The Artist as Art Historian
The earliest art historians were also artists, or perhaps rather artists who were also art historians. The relationship between theory, historiography, and practice is often led and taught from the historian’s perspective, rather than artists’. This panel considers the multivalent approaches to art history by artists/practitioners, from Vasari, to Ruskin, to contemporary artists and exhibitions. While the expression of an art historical perspective across media and methods has changed in response to contemporary pressures, art history within artmaking has been a consistent practice for centuries.
This panel invites contributions for 20-minute papers that ask what relevance historic art and historiography have to the past and present. We especially welcome artists whose practice incorporates art historical research. How have artists used art history to better understand their practice and thus engaged in art history across media? How have artists used their practice to teach or better understand art history to contextualise their work and that of others? How can these art historical manoeuvres activate new understanding of historical contexts including colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, or more? What do recent exhibitions such as Entangled Pasts or I Preraffaeliti: un Rinascimento Moderno and the works therein offer for this kind of art historical-artist perspective? How have art historical artists been involved in creating a ‘canon’ or ideas of ‘canonicity’ in the first place through their valorisation of certain names and involvement in institutions like the Royal Academy, or in reaction against it? How does art history cross borders and temporality for artists? This session invites papers from the Renaissance to the present day and expects to include a wide range of historical and geographic areas.
Session Convenors:
Melissa L Gustin, National Museums Liverpool
Susie Beckham, University of York
Speakers:
Lieske Huits, Leiden University
“How new styles are really formed”: Owen Jones’s Approaches to Architectural History
As the author The Grammar of Ornament (1856), architect and designer Owen Jones (1807-1874) is primarily remembered as a design theorist influential to the Design Reform Movement. Recent re-examinations of his work (Hrvol-Flores 2006, Horsfall-Turner 2023) have however argued for a restoration of his reputation, both as thinker and as practitioner. As is clear from the Grammar, Jones was closely invested in the study of the past. Jones even expressed the hope that the examples of global and historical ornament he provided there would allow artists to create original work based on universal principles these examples represented, and as such would provide the first steps towards the creation of a new style for the age. This emphasis on universality however has obfuscated his conceptualization of the mechanics of history, and its role in the development of style.
This paper will consider the way Jones’s work – both as a historian of ornament and architecture and as a design practitioner – was concerned with the material development of style, both in the past and in the nineteenth-century present. By comparing his discussion of the development of style(s) in the past to his own attempts at creating “modern” ornament in his designs for tiled floors in the 1840s and in his commercial architecture of the 1850s, it argues that thinking of Jones as a historian in parallel to his work as a design theorist and practitioner, allows us to appropriately appreciate nineteenth-century distinctions between taking inspiration from the past and simplistic copyism.
Ed Kettleborough, University of Bristol
Raiding and Reviving the Annals: RB Kitaj in the Early 60s
In February 1963, RB Kitaj presented his first solo exhibition at London’s Marlborough Gallery. The paintings presented were bewildering in their sheer range of reference, from the murder of Rosa Luxemburg to Friedrich Nietzsche and the Spanish Civil War. In their exploration and exploitation of art history, however, this paper finds a unifying logic.
Fascinated by the iconology of Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower, Kitaj pilfered journal articles for obscure figurative references. Critically, the artist explicitly thematised this intertextuality, even appending hand-written source lists to his paintings; his Marlborough catalogue reads more like a scholarly journal, with literary epigraphs, lengthy extracts from articles on Warburg, and a bibliography for further reading.
This air of scholarliness frustrated critics throughout Kitaj’s career, yet this paper argues that a deeply serious and meaningful project lay behind any pretence. Kitaj’s art is one of allegory, and as Walter Benjamin argued, the task of the allegorist is one of rescue: the dead matter of history must be made to live in the present. What his paintings attempted to do, then, was to levy the material of art history against the politics of the Cold War, one in which the Jewish Socialist Kitaj – like Benjamin – continued to see the accumulation of tragedies.
Michel Foucault declared Manet to be the first museum painter; one hundred years later, Kitaj turned a similar gaze to academic art history. Today, his art reminds us of the continuing need to find resonance in our research.
Anjalie Dalal-Clayton, Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts London
Keith Piper’s ‘Viva Voce’: A Filmic Approach to Doing Art History and Confronting the Racism in Rex Whistler’s Mural
In 2020, against the fevered backdrop of the Covid 19 pandemic and the reignited Black Lives Matter protests, an image surfaced on social media revealing explicitly racist imagery on the walls of Tate Britain’s basement restaurant. There as part of Rex Whistler’s now infamous wrap-around mural – ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’ (1927) – the image was not unknown to or undiscovered by Tate. The art gallery had for several years been grappling with how to interpret the much-beloved mural’s shocking depictions of colonial violence for its visitors but had made minimal effort to mitigate the offense and upset caused by the images because of its somewhat discreet location in the depths of the building. But after the outrage of 2020, Tate determined to confront the highly contested and controversial artwork by commissioning an artist to respond to it. This paper focuses on the result of that decision – the 2024 film installation ‘Viva Voce’ by Keith Piper, currently on view in the site of Tate’s former restaurant and surrounded by Whistler’s mural. In the paper, I will consider how Piper’s deep interest in art’s histories, and his firmly research-driven practice were vital to his production of the film. I will also discuss how the film itself, with its essay-like structure,temporal ambiguity and critical, investigative lens, exposes the imperial and artistic contexts in which Whistler was working, thereby providing a social art history of the mural and enabling contemporary audiences to make sense of its most disturbing elements.
Ben Caro, Anthony Caro Centre
Kat Cutler-MacKenzie, Royal Holloway, University of London
feeling looking: queer desire and the erotics of research in the (neo-)classical sculpture gallery
In this paper we explore the concept of ‘feeling looking’ in the figurative (neo-)classical sculpture collections at the Altes Museum, The British Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum, classical galleries as such were known as cruising sites in the pre-Stonewall era. We do so through an analysis of our 35mm slide installation with accompanying techno soundtrack feeling looking (2023), which was originally made for the exhibition Bodies of Love (2023) at gr_und gallery in Berlin. In feeling looking we investigate these collections informed by the shifting social contexts in which the works were viewed, with a focus on the role of looking, bodily desire and inter-corporeal connections in museum display and, more widely, in art historical research. In contrast to the “straight photograph”, which aims to represent an “objective” version of the artwork on display, we investigate what it might mean to take a “queer photograph” in the museum in feeling looking. In this paper we consider the cinematographic, darkroom and installation techniques that we used to do so, drawing upon Laura Marks’ concept of ‘haptic images’, which she argues are ‘erotic regardless of their content, because they construct an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image’ (1998). Informed by our artistic research undertaken in feeling looking, we end by exploring how audio-visual approaches to art historical research could be used to rethink museum viewership from the perspective of contact and encounter, moving towards embodied, multi-sensory research that centres the palimpsest of felt histories present in the museum.
Isabel Seligman, British Museum
Billie Duch Giménez, British Museum
‘What have we here?’ Hew Locke’s creative questioning of the British Museum collections
Hew Locke has often said that had he not been an artist, he would have been a historian; after his role in co-curating the British Museum exhibition Hew Locke: What have we here?, it is clear he is both.
Historical objects often form the very materials of his art: from adorning nineteenth-century Parian-ware busts with the regalia of empire, to drawing directly onto historical financial documents, such objects provide the means through which he discusses the complexities of colonial power. For decades, he has used symbolic historical objects including icons of sovereignty, replicas of war medals, and symbols of indigeneity or cultural exchange, to analyse and critique our understanding of historical power relationships.
Locke’s artistic practice complicates and expands our understanding of history. But in what have we here?, his challenge to the dominant historical narratives extended beyond his art and into the very selection of objects (from the British Museum and other UK collections) and their curation. As co-curators of the exhibition, we will examine how Locke used the presentation of historical objects to challenge and re-imagine the historiography of empire.
How did his creative practice inform the selection of objects? How did his existing artistic methods of layering, collaging, hybridity and masquerade shape the object groupings and presentation? How did his position as an artist-historian influence the exhibition layout and set design, and the style of interpretation? Finally, how did his artistic arrangements circumvent traditional historical narratives of power relations to activate new understandings of colonialism and imperialism?
Claudia Lomoschitz, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Water of Life and Domination: A queer-feminist artistic research on lactation
Since 2017 I research on queer-feminist implications of lactation, which led to various artistic works, ranging from video-installations to performances and publications. Within the lecture I will discuss the use of art historic depictions in contemporary artistic practice on the example of my latest video work LACTANS(Kunsthalle Vienna, 2023/24). As researcher, art history lecturer and artist, my artistic work is highly informed by art historical knowledge and the question of how knowledge can be disseminated within artistic works in multisensorial ways.
Within the Video work LACTANS, 25 art historical images emerge from a digitally animated ocean of milk. The narrations range from the Stone figurine of Willendorf, to depictions of the Egyptian goddess Isis, from the Egyptian intersex God of fertility Hapi, to the Greco-Roman story of Pero breastfeeding her imprisoned mother. The process of image selection will be discussed in this lecture, as well as the current body-political relevance of the chosen images. The narration of the video, plays a crucial part in the dissemination of knowledge, as it uses performative modes, like sounds, songs, everyday language and reflections. Two voices talk about the art historical context of the chosen images, of past myths and their reminiscence in contemporary bio politics. The video work asks questions about how moist power relations and opaque oppression can be liquified by engaging with Milk as mythological substance and historical material. “Depictions travel through the eyes of time, legends echo deep down in our cells –imagine history as a gulping throat reaching through time.” (LACTANS, 2023/24)