ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 25th Annual Conference 9th -I I th April 1999 IMAGES LVALUES Faculty of Arts University of Southampton Convened by Winchester School of Art CHEI I University CHO ~^^^H O F SOUTHAM P TO N 9LO F AR T ^ ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 25th Annual Conference 9th -I I th April 1999 IMAGES LVALUES Faculty of Arts University of Southampton Convened by Winchester School of Art CHE5 I University -.ER^ °f Southampton ?LOF ART IMAGES & VALUES 9-1 I April 1999 University of Southampton Welcome to the 25th Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians. We hope that this conference will be remembered, like those that preceded it, both for the quality of its academic sessions and for the other events which support and surround them: the Book Fair, the gallery receptions, and last but by no means least, the meetings of the many committees and sub-committees of the Association itself. This conference will address the many kinds of'value' associated with works of art and their images; with the production, legitimation and reproduction of those values; and with the images and values associated with art history itself. It will also address corresponding questions in the decorative arts, design and architecture. We intend too that the conference will explore the images and values of art, whether present in their objects, concepts or institutions, from within a variety of methodologies. Images & Values welcomes both the tenured and the freelance art historian, and welcomes too a variety of scholars from other disciplines and from overseas. We extend a particularly warm welcome to student delegates and others attending for the first time. We thank the many individuals who have worked for and with us, including Marieke Groenstein; Leslie Spiers, Conference Coordinator; John Gillett, Director of The Winchester Gallery; Sam Smiles; Stephanie Pratt; Godfrey Worsdale and the staff of Southampton City Art Gallery; Stephen Foster of the John Hansard Gallery; Jo Bushnell of the Millais Gallery; and Joyce Lewis and Zoe Kleinman of the Southampton University Press Office. Andrew Falconer, the AA H Administrator has provided an invaluable backstop. Finally, we offer our sincere thanks to the reception sponsors; Blackwells Publishers; Manchester University Press; and Thames and Hudson. We trust that your experience of the City of Southampton and its University is a pleasant and productive one. Barbara Burman Stephen Johnstone Brandon Taylor Conference Convenors FRIDAY 9TH APRIL FRIDAY 9TH APRIL FRIDAY 9TH APRIL 1.00 pm 1.45 pm 2.00 pm I ROOM I 163 Problems of Periodisation in Art History II ROOM I 143 Architecture, Antiquity and Aesthetics, c 1700-1840 III LECTURE THEATRE A Writing The Pre-Raphaelites IV ROOM I 145 The Transatlantic Imaginary: Nations, Values, Practices V LECTURE THEATRE C Rethinking Cultural Values in German Art, 1900-1 999 VI ROOM I 173 Animals in Art Images and Contexts VII ROOM 1093 Values in Renaissance Art VII I ROOM 1097 Photography and Value IX ROOM I I I I Evaluating Sculpture: Patronage, Production, Consumption X LECTURE THEATREB Artists' Lives: Biography and Intentionality Re-examined XI ROOM 1095 Making Exhibitions: Making Art History XII ROOM 1089 ingenious Transformations and Visionary Technologies XIII ROOM I 167 Ars Textrina: Preserving the Image and Enhancing the Value of Textiles XIV ROOM I 177 Art And Fashion: Mapping the Boundaries XV ROOM I 101 Policies and Politics in the Visual Arts JONATHAN HARRIS Marxist Theory and Periodisation in Arnold Mauser's The Social History of Art STEPHEN BENDING Every Man is Naturally an Antiquarian: Francis Grose and Polite Antiquities JASON ROSENFELD Absent of Reference: New Languages of Nature in the Critical Responses to Pre-Raphaelite Landscapes LENORA MOFFA Coxcomb into Mystic Whistler and American Values FRANCOISE FORSTER-HAHN Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Germany's Search for Identity JO KIRBY The Price of Quality: Factors Influencing the Cost of Pigments during the Renaissance FAY BRAUER Inscribing the Normal and the Abject Body: Photography at Saltpe'tnere Clinic and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts JOHANNA DARKE Public Monuments, Outdoor Sculpture Symbols as Objects JEREMY ROE A Study of the Seville Biography of Velazquez STEVEN GARTSIDE Consuming Culture(s): Modern American Artin Britain ARTHUR MILLER Visualising the Invisible: Imagery in 20th Century Art and Science LISA MONNAS TexDles and Paintings (14th-16th centuryj. The Benefit of Hindsight,' ROBERT RADFORD Boundaries and Border Raids: Configuring the Shared and Disputed Territories of Art and Fashion CHIN-TAO WU Guardians of Enterprise Culture: Art Trustees in the 1980s NEIL SHARP ROB STONE The History of Art Education as the Social Popular Variety Shown in Pevsner's Historiasm History of An? Nikolaus Pevsner's Academies of Art Past and Present MARIA GRAZIA LOLLA LUCY WATKINS 'Monuments' and 'Texts':Antiquarianism Vitruwus Britannicus and Architectural and the Beauty of Antiquity Discourse 1715-1725 JULIE L'ENFANT BOB PRIEST Reconstructing Pre-Raphaelitism: the A Full and Friendly Description of My Evolution of William Michael Rossetti's Pictures': The Influence ofD. G. Rossetti and Critical Position George Rae on the Criticism of F. G. Stephens REBECCA BEASLEY ADELINE JULIA Ezra Pound's Whistler Oscar Bluemner and the American Avant-Garde REINHOLD HELLER FREDERIC J. SCHWARTZ 'The nude, the foundation of all pictorial art The Eye of the Expert Walter Benjamin in free naturality':The Critical and Historical and the Avant-Garde Reception of Sexuality and Gender as Content in the Work of the Kunstlergemeinschaft Brucke. LUKE SYSON AND DORA BENTHOMAS THORNTON Artefici and Huomim Intendenti: Questions Difficulty and Invention: the Value of Art of Artistic Value in Sixteenth Century Italy Objects in Early Sixteenth Century Italy. PATRIZIA Dl BELLO RICHARD SHIFF Melancholic Portrait Gazers: the Waterlow Mechanism and Materialism in Photography Album, Maternal Fetishism and the Value of and Painting Photographic Prints. ANDREW NAYLOR ELIZABETH NORMAN The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Public Art, Public Values^ JOANNA WOODALL ANNIE RICHARDSON Portraiture as Biography: Antonis Mor's Self- The Artist at Play: Gainsborough's Letters Portrait SABINE MARSCHALL RICHARD WILLIAMS Re-defining the Canon: The Role of the Two Johannesburg Biennales (1995 and 1997) in the Formation of a New South African Art Exhibitions and Non-Events LILIAN LIJN ANNA BENTKOWSKA Body and Soul: Interactions between the Campus Anthropomorphus or Material and the Immaterial in Sculpture Anamorphosis? The Mystery of Cardinal Montalb's Garden JANE BRIDGEMAN DAVID MITCHELL 'Rtccamente vestiti e nobelmente adornati': The Development of Unen Damask Textiles for Dress and Fumish/ng - The Social Collections Role of Textiles in Fifteenth Century Italy. MALCOLM BARNARD ED LILLEY The Anxiety of Ambivalence 'The satin corset is perhaps the nude of our time': Thinlang about (Un)dressing the Body in Nineteenth Century France. ANDREW BRIGHTON ANNA HARDING State Kitsch: the Social. Political and Jumping Through Hoops: Funding Catena. Aesthetic Origins, Assumptions and Consequences of 'Art for Everyone'. Value Judgements and 'New Grcus' SATURDAY IOTH APRIL SATURDAY IOTH APRIL SATURDAY IOTH APRIL SATURDAY IOTH APRIL 11.15 am 12.00 9.15 AM 10.00 AM ELEANOR TOLLFREE Caught within a tradition: Art History's problem with Napoleonic Art ANDREW BALLANTYNE Specimens of Ancient Sculpture DEBORAH CHERRY Title to be announced CHRISTINE BOYANOSKI The Cultural Decolonisation of 'British North America' IAIN BOYD WHITE The German City in the Twentieth Century: the Aesthetic Imperative MATTHEW CRASKE The Role of the 'Cult of Sensibility' in changing Attitudes to the Death of Domestic Animals in England STEPHEN CAMPBELL A/lontegna's Parnassus :Mythic Invention, Natural Philosophy and the Value of Painting STEVE EDWARDS The Organ Grinder and the Monkey ANNE MACPHEE William Roscoe's Engagement with Sculptors in Early 19th Century Liverpool RICHARD WENDORF Reconstructing Sir Joshua MARGARET MACDONALD Song like a Butterfly: Whistler on Exhibition COLIN TUDGE Art Science and Religion RUTH BARNES Indian Trade Textiles: Sources and Transmission of Design LESLIE TOPP Men's Gothing the Warenhaus and the Goldman & Salatsch Building by Adolph Loos COLIN TRODD Writing Painting: Values, Identities and National School Discourses in Victorian Culture DANA ARNOLD The Engravings of the Temples at Paestum and the Development of Architectural Debate in Britain I 750-1800 MICHAELA GIEBELHAUSEN Writing artistic motivation: Holman Hunt as 'the painter of the Christ' MARK RAWLINSON Mimesis, Subjective Aesthetic Experience and the Invisibility of Modernism: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and the Precisionist Charles Shee/er BERND NICOLAI The Myth of Monumentalism: Megalomania, Destruction and Virtualism in National Socialist Architecture ANTHEA BROOK Seafood Soup and a Taste for Nature: the Animal Life of Pietro Tacca. EVELYN WELCH New, Old and Second-Hand Culture: the Case of the Renaissance Sleeve DAVID EVANS Putting Soviet Photography in its Place BENEDICT READ The Happy Prince? ANDREW KENNEDY William Darnell and Richard Ayton -Panoptic versus Romantic Subject in the Mapping of the Nation DORCAS TAYLOR Interventions: Re-appraising the Making of Art History through Contemporary Artists' Responses to Museum Collections' SANDA MILLER Cybernetic Pas-de-Deux at Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles CHRISTINE WISE Suffrage Banners at the Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University ALICIA FOSTER Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman PAUL BARLOW Just What Is It That Makes the Avant-Garde So Different So Appealing? Manet Millais and the Moment of Modernity. FRANK SALMON Envisioning Antiquity Anew: British Architects' Representations of Rome and Pompeii after 1815 WILLIAM VAUGHAN Written Out? The Case of Ford Madox Brown JENNIFER GORDON The Tate's American Friends SABINE ECKMANN German Exile Art and the Discourse on its Aesthetic Value FIONA RUSSELL The Taxidermical Sculpture of Charles Waterton BARBARA PEZZINI Filarete and Filelfo: Architecture, History and Politics in Fifteenth Century Milan JOHN GANGE Photography's Genera) Economy DENNIS WARDLEWORTH Industry and Science in Stone and Bronze: the Sculptures of Imperial Chemical House LYDIA O'RYAN Searching for Charlotte, Artists' Muse and Producer of the Erotic Anita Berber Portfolio 1919 PANEL DISCUSSION I JOHN TSCHALENKO '/ Paint What I Can See and At Any Given Moment. I Willi Start from What I can See, from That Place at That Moment' (Humphrey Ocean) DINAH EASTOP The Social Life of Representations. The Value of Haddon's String Figures SUSAN ATHANASSIOU Fashioning Artistic identity: Matisse's Femme au Chapeau DAVID PETERS CORBETT Periodisation in British Art after 1850 ABIGAIL MOORE 'Voyages': The Transference of Images of the Empire Style in Interior Design to Regency England. TIM BARRINGER Pre-Raphaelitism's Languages of Labour HELEN REES Art Exports and the Formation of National Heritage in Britain, 1882-1997 SHULAMITH BEHR Reinserting German Colonial Identity: from the South West African Protectorate to Post-Colonial Namibia STEVE BAKER The Postmodern Animal CAROLINE CAMPBELL Revaluing Renaissance Art Cassone Paintings and the Telling of History in Fifteenth Century Florence MARK DURDEN The Tableau versus the Document: Photography in Contemporary Art SARAH CRELLIN Raising interest Charles Wheeler and the Bank of England MARSHA MESKIMMON Grethe Jurgens' Das Atelier: Women's Autobiography and Situated Subjectivity PANEL DISCUSSION II DENNA JONES SCI-ARTThe Wellcome Trust's Funding Initiative to Encourage Collaborations between Artists and Scientists REGULA SCHORTA Learning about Medievai Texti/es: Co-operation between Conservator and Art Historian AMY SARGEANT Yamamoto andWenders:A Notebook on Cities and Clothes MARY BEAL FILM SESSION SPECIAL EVENT: The Changing Art of Government The Secret Art of Government Discussion with W.J.T. MITCHELL (60 minutes approximately) HI LTA V LTC VI ROOM I 173 X LTB XI ROOM1095 XII ROOM1089 SUNDAY I ITH APRIL 9.15 am VALERIE WEBB 'Temporary residence' in the London art world: a reconsideration of artistic identity and historical positioning of the Camden Town Group BARRIE BULLEN Burne-Jones and the myths of the Memorials ANNE MASSEY The Imagined and the ReakThe Creative Partnership of Lawrence Alloway and Sylvia Sleigh TIM BERGFELDER German Cinema: Myths and Histories JON BLACKWOOD Gaudier-Brzeska's Animalier Sketches ROBERT MANIURA Voting with their Feet Art Pilgrimage and Ratings in the Renaissance JOAN COUTU Apollos of a New Generation? Collections of Reproductions in Mid-18th Century Britain CHRISTINE CONLEY Reading her Desire: Allegory and the Symbolics of Loss in the Work of Eva Hesse NICHOLAS TROMANS ^ne First British Curators? BriDsh Institution and the Definition of the Art Exhibition DAVID JARED MORSE Rafael Barradas. Vibraoonismo and Hyper­ Consicous Communication in Art SUNDAY I I TH APRIL 10.00 am JOANNE MORRA Reciprocal Alliances: The case of Bruege/ and Rauschenberg COLIN CRUISE Poetry and Religion: revealing the mythical in Pre-Raphaelitism JOHN BECK Art History in the Wilderness: John C. Van Dyke and Reyner Banham ASTRID IHLE Modernity, Decay, and the Loss of Utopia -Three Generations of GDR Women Photographers: A discussion of the work of Evelyn Richter, Gundula Schulze el Dowy, and Anett Stuth JONATHAN BURT Faithful Dogs and Images of Death around World War I ANABELTHOMAS /mages of Saint Catherine: A Re-evaluation of Cosimo and the Influence of his Art on the printed imaging associated with the Dominican Order JONATHAN WOOD Piasters of Paris: Brancusi, Picasso, Gacometti and the Poetics of Plaster in the Early 1930s CHRISTOPHER HORROCKS Machine Agency: Andy Warhol and the Contradictions of Post-Avant-Garde Identity. CHRISTIANA PAYNE The Art of Compromise: An Art Historian as Exhibition Curator FRANCES FOLLIN Painting the doors of Perception: Drugs. Science and Bridget Riley's Op Art SUNDAY I ITH APRIL 11.15 am THOMAS A. DOWSON Rock Art & History: From Lascaux to the Louvre MARKTURNER Popularizing the Pre-Raphaelites BRIDGID DOHERTY Media in Germany: Darboven and Fassbinder MATTHEW BROWER Shooting Blind: Early Animal Photography and the Photographic Blind CATHERINE HARDING Madness, Mysticism and the Cosmos: Evaluating the Drawings of Opicinius de Canistris (I296-C.I35I) GILLIAN WHITELEY Junk, Funk and Empty Space: Trashing Material Values in the 1950s and 60s. NIRU RATNAM Ignoring Biography. Constructing the Self and Deceiving the Others: the Artistic Career of Anish Kapoor JUDITH GREEN A A/lany-Sided Mirror: The International Exhibition of Chinese Art 1935-36 JORELLA ANDREWS Maria Sibylla Menam: Painting the Microcosm SUNDAY I ITH APRIL 12.00 MALCOLM WARNER Millais in Reproduction SILKEWENK Commemoration in the service of German unification -The controversy about the Berlin Holocaust memorial and public art in Germany after 1989/90 AMY MARIE ZUCCA Rethinking the Main Chapel at the Madonna dell' Orto, Venice FRAN LLOYD Re-thinking 'New British Sculpture' of the 1980s and the Making of Meaning JULIAN STALLABRASS The Identity of the 'Young British Artist' VICKI KIRKMAN 'Art in Revolution' and Bhush Identities of Construcuvism XIV MARGARET MAYNARD PAUL JOBLING RANDAL RHODES ROOM 'Grassroots Style'. Aboriginal Art and Fashion Figures: Intertextual Masculine Fashioning Wrapping and Shrouding the 1177 European Fashion Design of the I970s-80s Identities in Fashion Photography During the Dandiacal Body 1990s. STRAND I PROBLEMS OF PERIODISATION IN ART HISTORY Jonathan Harris (Keele University), Paul Barlow (University of Northumbria) and Colin Trodd (University of Sunderland) The problem of periodisation is central to art history: it generates both conceptual possibilities and blockages. What functions, values and qualities are inscribed into readings of change, development and rupture? How are the spaces between different cultural moments framed and formalised? How do particular discursive patterns emerge as classical models for art historical enquiry? What is judged or governed in those readings that endow a particular object, style or school with certain systems of meaning? This strand will explore these issues. While examining the way in which art history classifies, evaluates and organises the relations between objects and processes, the strand also seeks to engender critical readings of the roles played by cultural institutions in the social and discursive life of artefacts. As one of our main aims is to consider how the authority of a movement or style is articulated in specific ways of writing, thinking or organising art, we intend to reassess those legitimating narratives that block, resist or overlook specific forms of making art. By dealing with the cultural traffic in conceptualisations of change, inheritance and progression, we also wish to explore how such distinctions are generated and sustained. JONATHAN HARRIS (University of Keele) Marxist Theory and Periodisation in Arnold Hauser's The Social History of Art NEIL SHARP (London) The History of Art Education as the Social History of Art? Nikolaus Pevsner's Academies of Art: Past and Present ROB STONE (London) Popular Variety Shown in Pevsner's Historicism PROBLEMS OF P E R I O D IS AT I O N I N THE EARLY 1980s within both the steam and hot air generated by New Art History it was often claimed by revisionists that art history and 'real' history bore too little resemblance to each other Influential studies such as Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Florence (1972) seemed to narrow the gap somewhat but did little to broach explicitly the big issues regarding theoretical principles of historical analysis. Althusserian Marxists interested in our discipline wanted to know, for example, how art historians might respond to the post-structuralist philosopher's finger-wagging dictum that 'the knowledge of history is no more historical than the knowledge of sugar is sweet.The knowledge of sugar is chemical and the knowledge of history is theoretical'. Social History of Art texts offer means of linking valuable 'historical' art history to the range of meta-discursive questions concerning us in this session. Hauser's magnum opus (195 I) represents an important link in the tenuous but unbroken chain between those whom T.J. Clark in 1974 called the founders of social history of art and studies in this tradition produced since the 1960s. In this paper I will review, from our own 'post-Marxist' perspective, Hauser's series in terms of its 'periodisation practices' and their articulation with Hauser's Marxist view of history and culture. T HIS PAPER WILL EXPLORE the issues pertaining to periodicity in Nikolaus Pevsner's Academies of Art: Past and Present (1940). In his preface, Pevsner explains that the book is generated from a perceived contrast in the social status of the artist 'past and present'.The sense of alienation central to the experience of modern art calls for a historical examination of the emergence of this 'perilous disease'. It appears that the narration of art education's history, as one capable of positioning the artist within social relations, might locate the origin of this problem as well as discover a cure. Curiously, however this is all then retracted; the book is primarily meant as a 'straightforward history'. So why were these issues raised? By nonetheless positioning narrative as a historical grounding for the widely perceived crisis of art in the 1930s, might its self-doubt locate a crucial problem in the way social and institutional histories were (and are) believed to help account for the present? Is the problem of narrative formation, and so periodicity, a problem of reference, and of the way a history might be ungrounded by its own self-enclosure and logic? I will be concerned with how Pevsner isolates his narrative from the broader art historical field, and with problems in his main epochal distinctions and their transitions, particularly the differences between the 'artist's education' and 'art education'. I CONOLOGY WAS AN IMPORTANT AREA of concern for for I Nikolaus Pevsner in the formulation of art-historical conceits and methodologies for Britain in the 1930s. Like others, Pevsner has continued to be castigated for historicist vulgarities that appear to arise from it. However the personification of historical periods demanded by iconology as an interpretative procedure needn't be regarded as necessarily intellectually coarse. Pevsner's use of iconological imperatives importantly shaped his attempts to describe the emergence of the Baroque into a broader art-historical context of considerations of the meaning of the period, and by considering Pevsner's pseudononymous writings on suburban domestic architecture, this paper will discuss important allegorical attitudes to work in this set of apologies for specific forms of modem architecture. 6 IN ART H I STO RY N APOLEONIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE has traditionally been perceived as 'decadent' and as illustrative of the 'decline' the so- called 'neo-classical movement' in France. Monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe du Caroussel (1806-7) and theVendome Column (1810) in Paris have been condemned as 'mere antique revivals', examples of 'artistic devaluation' (Honour 1968) and as 'architectural fantasies' expressing Napoleon's 'self-glorification' (Boime 1990).The painting, sculpture and decorative arts produced under Napoleon have often been criticized in a similar manner.The 'decadence' of art produced during his reign has been emphasised in the eyes of critics by the fact that Napoleon fell so soon, and by the development of the 'myth' of Napoleon as 'a bad emperor'. In this paper I shall consider how reception of Napoleonic art has been conditioned by the traditional foundation of Art History on an analysis of stylistic periods.The way in which Napoleon modelled himself on the emperors of ancient Rome and created Paris as the 'new Rome' has tended to be written out of Art History by the Hellenic bias of the discipline. My paper will be divided into two parts. Firstly, I shall suggest that the way in which Napoleonic art has been analysed in the past is particularly related to the tradition of criticism of classical art, in particular, to the influence of Winckelmann. Recent critics (eg. Eisner 1995) have offered a reinterpretation of the decline of Roman art experienced in the late imperial period. An analysis of Napoleonic art in terms of the Roman visual iconography and ideology it employs (considering as a background French artistic education at the Academie de France in Rome and artistic developments during the Revolution) is one way in which the art produced during this period can be reappraised. Secondly, in response to work by Bann (1983) and Prendergast (1997), I shall investigate the more complex issue of precisely how Napoleonic artists negotiated 'history' in their work.Through a presentation of case studies focusing on examples of monumental architecture, sculpture and painting produced during his reign, and in particular on the creation of the Musee des Antiques, I shall offer a close analysis of how French artists interpreted the more recent events of French 'history' in terms of a sophisticated visual dialectic with the past. O VER THE LAST TWO DECADES a great deal of interests has been displayed in late-eighteenth and late-nineteenth century British art. If in work on the earlier period complex problems have been emerging from the tension between registrations of a critical aesthetic for painting, and the shifting identity of cultural practice within commercial society, in the later period commentators have been drawn to those forms of visual representation that seem to hover on the edge of an engagement with modernism.This model of periodisation moves from a modified neoclassical aesthetic that frames itself by acknowledging the conventions of modern society (Reynolds. Barry, Fuseli) to an aesthetic of negotiation that makes itself from the creative refusal to continue traditional mimetic codes in its grappling with the material landscape of modernity (Whistler Beardsley and perhaps, Sickert). 'Theory', it seems, is replaced by 'self­consciousness' in a periodising narrative that finds value in the relationship between these symbiotic moments. This paper looks at a number of mid-Victorian writer-artists and cultural commentators in order to assess how they articulated or regenerated critical values in their readings of modern art. It poses the following questions. Why has it been assumed that mid-Victorian art has little to contribute to the standard periodising narrative? What view of historical ELEANOR TOLLFREE (University of Bristol/Victoria and Albert Museum) Caught within a tradition: Art History's problem with Napoleonic Art COLIN TRODD (University of Sunderland) Writing Painting:Values, Identities and National School Discourses in Victorian Culture 7 PROBLEMS OF P E R I O D I S AT I O N and cultural development does the conventional model block or resist? Why has the critical framework of Victorian art theory been neglected by many specialists? What happens to Reynolds' academic formalism in the mid-Victorian period and was it incorporated into narratives about the relations between painting, history and national identity? Can examinations of Victorian national-school discourses provide any understanding of the evaluative dimension to the relevant periodising techniques? PAUL BARLOW (University of Northumbria) Just What Is It That Makes the Avant-Garde So Different, So Appealing? Manet, Millais and the Moment of Modernity. DAVID PETERS CORBETT (University ofYork) Periodisation in British Art after T HIS PAPER WILL EXAMINE SOME of the problems involved in the equation of aesthetic and historical judgement in the definition of 'avant-garde' identity: construed as an event in which traditional- or 'academic'- and modern aesthetic categories are divided and articulated. The problem of evaluation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become inseparable from the teleology of modernity To be valued is to participate in the project of Modernisation.To be bad is to resist, neglect, or misrecognise this process.The connection of this rationale to the ethics of Marxism has been commented upon by many critics. Indeed, there is still a strong tendency to equate aesthetic and political radicalism. This paper will look at the some of the problems involved in the construction of 'avant-garde' identity, with particular reference to the careers of Manet and Millais, construed as iconic avant-garde and kitsch identities. Manet is customarily hailed as the first authentically modern artist, while Millais' career is characterised as a sell-out to academic/kitsch culture and to 'bourgeois' values. By looking in detail at the late work of Millais, its connection with Manet's will be examined, as will the complex of social, aesthetic and political judgements which feed the avant­ garde/academic distinction and which continue to characterise articulations of the emergence of the 'modern' moment and its now- entrenched cultural hierarchies. T HE RECENT DECISION to dedicate the Tate Gallery's Milbank building to British art has thrown into high relief some of the difficulties which periodisation implies. For it has immediately become clear as if it wasn't before, that periodisation is largely lacking in the history of British art after I 850 and that, where it exists, it is unnuanced and inadequate. Faced with the task of mounting a history of art in Britain on the walls of Millbank, the absence of any agreed set of relationships to define how that art should be divided up, how canon and importance should be understood, and how artists should be selected or passed over become peculiarly acute.This paper explores some of the issues this situation raises by focussing on one moment in this muddied narrative: the transition from a 'realist' or 'late-nineteenth century' art (even the terms are in flux) to the 'modernism' of 1914. I discuss this period of transition as a means of clarifying questions about the utility of periodisation, its limitations, and its consequences, political and pragmatic, for the project to define the history of British art in the years after I 850. VALERIE WEBB (Kingston University) 'Temporary residence' in the London art world: a reconsideration of artistic identity and historical positioning of the Camden Town Group A S THE 1997 EXHIBITION at the Barbican entitled 'Modern Art in Britain. 1910-1914' bears testament, art historians have tended to date the emergence of English 'modernism' from 1910 onwards. Roger Fry's two Post- Impressionist exhibitions are cited as key moments of change, and his particular definition and use of the word 'modern' to construct certain artists or groups as 'modern', has been embraced by critics and historians.Yet adopting a retrospective interpretation and concentrating mainly on those works falling within Fry's 'modern' canon E IN ART HISTORY has resulted in a 'forgetting' of other artists working contemporaneously also deemed modern by critics other than Fry. In the first instance, my paper addresses these issues and argues that the meaning of the term 'modem' meant something different from art critics writing for say The Studio or Art News where it was applied to artists such as Lavery, Orpen and Sargent, for example. In the second instance, and concentrating specifically on the core members of the Fitzroy Street Group (later evolving into the Camden Town Group), I will look at how the early use of the term 'modern' validated particular artists, whilst those artists central to the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Group struggled to find a permanent 'residence', i.e. validation, in the London art world. Using contemporary sources in the way of art journals and periodicals, it is evident that prior to 1910 critics struggled to find a 'home' for key Fitzroy Street Group members in art critical terms. After the arrival of Post-Impressionism to these shores, critics began to tentatively discuss their work in terms of 'progressive', Impressionist or Post-Impressionist. In later years critics and historians have readily affixed a label to them: 'A Progressive English Group with Post Impressionist Leanings' (Finch 1992), thus fixing the art historical identity of the Group. As a result, many of the artists have not been considered individually and a closer examination reveals a group of mixed and shifting identities, not easily pigeonholed. A RT HISTORY HAS NEGLECTED both Pieter Bruegel's paintings of the Towers of Babe! (1563; c. I 568/9) and Robert Rauschenberg's drawings of Dante's Inferno (1958-60).This is somewhat surprising since they can be made to conform to the discipline's theoretical periodisation of their (art) historical moments: the former can be read through iconographic analysis, and the latter as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. Perhaps the lacunas are based on their 'exceptional' status, making them somehow resistant to these traditional regimes of disciplinarity and periodisation? By considering the specificity of the (art) historical moment as well as the epistemological position of the art historian, this paper will discuss the way in which art history disavows certain types of analyses which fall outside of the legitimated and ideological information of a 'period' and its knowledges. By taking up the theoretical issues which are simply implied within the art historical literature on those two works of art - the sibling theories of translation and allegory - and by bringing them to the foreground, I will propose that a relationship can be established which both relies on periodisation while at the same time works against just such categorisation. In other words, by positing a model of epistemological reciprocity based upon a dialogic play between text and image, I will propose that the problem of periodisation is a flexible frame which must be made to bend under the weight of interrogation. Specifically, this paper will track the ways in which certain theories of translation from the sixteenth and twentieth centuries function in relation to Bruegel's paintings, and how twentieth century readings of allegory are renegotiated when figured through Rauschenberg's illustrations.This epistemological tracking will be based on what I have called tropological contingency - wherein a specific trope, in this instance both translation and allegory, are tracked through separate and yet contingent (art) historical and theoretical genealogies.The connection that will be forged between the two case studies is theoretical rather than historical. As such, I will ask whether it is possible to engage with these disparate works of art and their historical moment with similar sets of tools? Does this approach presuppose that the historical must be specific, while the theoretical can JOANNE MORRA (University College London) Reciprocal Alliances:The case of Bruegel and Rauschenberg 9 THOMAS A. DOWSON (University of Southampton) Rock Art & History: From Lascaux to the Louvre be transhistorical? If so, what role does periodicity play or preclude in such relationship? While the possibilities which emerge from these two case studies level a substantive critique at any narrow understanding of periodicity which does not allow for its necessary formation and dissemination, I will ultimately be asking what is at stake in the move to simultaneously violate and maintain the structures of historical and theoretical periodisation. Most people are familiar with the prehistoric cave art from Europe - in caves such as Lascaux and Altamira. Images that are painted and engraved onto surfaces are in fact found throughout the world: and have a very wide range of dates. But it is the cave art from Western Europe, particularly Lascaux and Altamira, that is incorporated in 'art histories' of the world. Here they serve as introductory devices to the real business of the history of art. Rock art form other parts of the world is of no real consequence, it merely tantalises archaeologists and students of aesthetic form. In the last few decades the study of Rock art, although still problematic, has advanced immeasurably. Studies that were once little more than descriptions of formal qualities are now much more theoretically and methodologically rigorous. But this research is overlooked in recent art histories. In this paper I address the intellectual marginalisation of rock art, and its research, in art history. I also examine the way in which our post-enlightenment notions of art have greatly informed the research into prehistoric arts. In so doing I offer an outsider's insight into the problems of periodisation in art history - particularly the conceptual role of prehistoric arts. 0 STRAND II ARCHITECTURE, ANTIQUITY AND AESTHETICS, C.I700 - 1840 Dana Arnold (University of Leeds), and Stephen Bending (University of Southampton) This strand will consider the significance of the print and its role in the dissemination of aesthetic ideas in the eighteenth century. Attention will be directed to new and innovative forms of visual representation and the relationship to the ever-refining set of cultural values applied to and associated with antiquity. This new visual language made three-dimensional objects widely available in a readable and coherent two-dimensional formula between 1700 and c 1840. It equipped polite society with the critical faculties necessary to determine the associative values of modern and antique architecture and design. The importance of this and the changing relationship between text and image will also be considered, with the aim of raising questions about the relationship between the mass produced image and the original, and the implications for the aura and status of the original object in an era before Benjamin's 'age of mechanical reproduction'. ABIGAIL MOORE (University of Leeds) 'Voyages':The Transference of Images of the Empire Style in Interior Design to Regency England. buildings of ancient Rome and Pompeii after 1815 which are quite distinct in type from those of the eighteenth century.These images fuelled a new phase of interest in Rome among the British public, an interest which is also reflected in early nineteenth-century literature and historiography and which provides a context for the great 'Roman' public buildings which appeared in England during the 1830s. D OMINIQUEVIVANT-DENON'S Voyages dans la Basse et Haute D'Egypte was described by 1806 as having affected 'many articles of interior decoration' and having become 'the present prevailing fashion' in Regency England.This paper will explore the impact thatVivant-Denon had on the establishment of the Egyptian revival in interior design, firstly in Paris and then across the Channel at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We will examine how this Egyptian vogue was metamorphosed into English style, who adopted it and why.The paper will focus on ways in which the English aristocracy employed an aesthetic taste devised specifically to help maintain the French Empire after the Revolution, whilst fearing revolution on their own side of the Channel. A case study of the Regency collection at Harewood House, Yorkshire, will then be used to explore the associative concepts of stylistic transference. How important were Denon's and Percier and Fontaine's collections of two-dimensional designs for the creation of the interiors of Regency homes? Did the commissioners of such interiors understand and utilise the associative values of revivalist design? Notions of status, taste and consumerism will be employed to examine the impact of the Egyptian revival on English taste, with an aim to produce a much fuller picture of how influential Denon's Voyages and Percier and Fontaine's Recueil were on English design and taste. 4 STRAND III WRITING THE PRE-RAPHAELITES Michaela Giebelhausen (University of Essex) and Tim Barringer (Yale University) From its inception, Pre-Raphaelitism defined itself in writing as much as in paint. Of the original Brotherhood, F. G. Stephens and William Michael Rossetti became art critics and historians of the movement, while around the turn of the century, biographies of Rossetti and Millais, and William Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaeltttsm and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905) established a seemingly definitive account. This session addresses the powerful hold of this earlier historiography over twentieth-century responses to Pre-Raphaelitism. Papers will re-examine the formation of this pervasive mythology and the textual strategies by which it was achieved. Also under discussion will be the attempts of successive generations of art historians to position the Pre-Raphaelites within larger art-historical narratives. JASON ROSENFELD (New York University) Absent of Reference: New Languages of Nature in the Critical Responses to Pre-Raphaelite Landscapes JULIE L'ENFANT (College ofVisual Arts, St Paul, Minnesota) Reconstructing Pre-Raphaelitism: the Evolution ofWilliam Michael Rossetti's Critical Position BOB PRIEST (Open University) 'A Full and Friendly Description of My Pictures':The Influence of D. G. Rossetti and George Rae on the Criticism of F. G. Stephens WRITING THE PRE-RAPHAELITES T HE PRE-RAPHAELITE APPROACH to nature in many of the circle's early canvases met with mixed critical reactions in the late 1840s and early I 850s. Pictures such as Ophelia, A Huguenot, The Hireling Shepherd, and Collins's May, in the Regent's Park were questioned for their seeming discrepancy between the subject matter and the artists' concern for botanical accuracy and hyperclarity of vision.The languages of nature that emerged in Pre-Raphaelite criticism were surprisingly bereft of art historical reference - the citation of old-master precedents so prevalent in contemporary writings being completely absent. In the vanguard of this approach were W.M, Rossetti and F.G. Stephens in their earliest forays into art criticism, in which a brazenness of fresh critical discourse on landscape form a kind of original form of criticism commensurate with that of the concurrent practice of the PRB painters. A S PRB MEMBER, editor of The Germ, and brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Rossetti was in a unique position to construct Pre-Raphaelitism. He began writing art criticism to defend the brotherhood from critical attack.This paper traces his efforts to define the movement from its early days, when he presented it as an elect band free from artistic convention and without debts to other archaic or archaising artists, or even to the theories of Ruskin. By examining reviews in English and American periodicals, this paper shows Rossetti's focus on earnest thought in works of Pre-Raphaelite painters, especially Hunt and Millais, sharply distinguished from 'trivial' art of the day. It also traces the rise of William Rossetti's interest in pictorial beauty and examines his critical reaction to the second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism inspired by the poetic medievalism of his brother. Later reviews and essays show a deepening of Rossetti's conception of Pre-Raphaelitism, which could encompass artists as diverse from the original membership as Burne-Jones and Whistler Final statements demonstrate a willingness to acknowledge influences on the movement, yet underscore one of Rossetti's leading ideas, that Pre-Raphaelitism could not be critically defined. I F PRE-RAPHAELITISM HAS A CLAIM to influence the development of I modernism it is as much through its committed critics and the activities of determined patrons as it is through the efforts of its practitioners.The critic F. G. Stephens was a contributor to The Germ and friend to D. G. Rossetti, George Rae was among the earliest collectors of Rossetti's work. While it has been suggested that Stephens allowed Rossetti to manipulate his contribution to discussions on that artist's work, I shall propose that the relationship between the critic, Rossetti and George Rae indicated a partnership with which modernity replaced the role of the Academy. Collector and artist show a consciousness of the importance of primacy in both the formal structure of the artwork and in its collection. While the artist informs the critic of his claim to initiate certain forms the collector insists on recognition of their importance and in establishing the reputation of the artist.The role of the critic in this relationship is crucial and edifying; while Ruskin pontificates, Stephens accommodates. DEBORAH CHERRY (University of Sussex) Title to be announced WRITING THE PRE-RAPHAELITES F ROM 1851 ONWARD Holman Hunt's engagement with the figure of Christ was motivated by his own religious beliefs. Images such as The Light of the World (I 854), The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860) and The Shadow of Death (1873) established Holman Hunt as the century's 'painter of the Christ'. However Hunt hesitated to admit the religious motivation of his work. In his public narratives the spheres of art and religion were kept apart in order to represent an image of the artist as poet and thinker which continued the Reynoldsian tradition of painting as equal to the classic liberal arts.The image of the artist who worked according to divine inspiration was unsuitable for the reconfiguring of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic as Protestant work ethic and moral discipline. Although Hunt kept the spheres of art and religion separate, he enlisted experts in both fields - the art critic F.G. Stephens and the Archdeacon Frederick Farrar - to certify the aesthetic value of his pictures and confirm their specific religious persuasion. M ADOX BROWN ISA PARADOXICAL FIGURE in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism. While intimately connected with the leading figures of the Brotherhood from before the time of its inception - and being closely involved with almost every stage of the movement - he never became a full member of the group. Furthermore, his impact appears to have been resented by some members, notably Holman Hunt, and was subjected to a considerable amount of negative commentary in the Pre-Raphaelite circle.This paper will look at the ways in which Madox Brown's role was treated by early narrators of the history of the movement, in particular Holman Hunt and William Michael Rossetti. It will consider in particular the use that was made of him as a means of defining and legitimating the practices of the Brotherhood - often by means of negative comparison. It will also consider alternative readings of his career and the ways in which he has been treated in more recent studies on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and will look at attempts that have been made to view his work in other perspectives. W HEN WHISTLER CLAIMED THAT 'Industry in Art is a necessity, not a virtue, and the evidence of the same is a blemish, not a quality', he contested one of the key maxims of Pre-Raphaelitism. For Ruskin. as for Madox Brown and Holman Hunt, the signs of labour written into the finish of each work acted as one guarantor of both aesthetic and moral value. Contemporary Pre-Raphaelite texts, from published biographies to private diaries and correspondence, are shot through with languages of work and the life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist (like that of the missionary) was narrated as a performance of exemplary labourThis paper places Pre-Raphaelite languages of labour in a broader rhetorical context in the theological, critical and imaginative writing of the period, and examines the idea of labour as the point of intersection between notions of personal morality and of aesthetic quality. At its most extreme, in Ford Madox Brown's Work and Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, the narrative of the artist's labour attains a place of crucial importance in the meaning of the object: the process and product of labour become interdependent. A concluding section reads the Ruskin-Whistler trial as a final playing out of Pre-Raphaelite languages of labour which, in Whistler, his writings and paintings, confronted their apparent antithesis. MICHAELA GIEBELHAUSEN (University of Essex) Writing artistic motivation: Holman Hunt as 'the painter of the Christ' WILLIAM VAUGHAN (Birkbeck College, London) Written Out? The Case of Ford Madox Brown TIM BARRINGER (Yale University) Pre-Raphaelitism's Languages of Labour BARRIE BULLEN (University of Reading) Burne-Jones and the Myths of the Memorials COLIN CRUISE (University of Staffordshire) Poetry and Religion: Revealing the Mythical in Pre-Raphaelitism MARKTURNER (Roehampton Institute) Popularizing the Pre-Raphaelites WRITING THE PRE-RAPHAELITES G IORGIANA BURNE-JONES WAS Edward Burne-Jones's principal manager and agent. She was largely responsible for perpetuating the myth of the painter as the grand old man of English art, first as he established his reputation and then immediately after his death.The principal source of material about him comes from her Memorials (1904), a document heavily edited in the direction of respectability. After Burne­Jones's death one of his close young female friends, Frances Graham, spoke of these Memorials. She felt that the forbidding and practical wife had failed to communicate the imaginative importance of aspects of Burne-Jones's life and, in particular, had not recognised the persistent transactions he made between reality and fantasy. 'It needs another dreamer to do that' she said. 'But failing that book of dreams,' she added, 'those with eyes to see may read much in his pictures.' This paper is an attempt to reinscribe the dream-work in Burne-Jones's painting and to illustrate the imaginative short-fall of the Memorials. P OETIC WAS PART OF A FASHIONABLE 'Grosvenor Gallery aesthetic' vocabulary in the I 880s. In this paper I will argue for other; deeper connotations with sex and religion, particularly with an Anglican mysticism.The paper will start with an examination of the debates around the category 'poetic' in art practice and criticism in Britain in the late nineteenth century. I will contextualize the term in relation to the work of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon (whose painting Poetry (1865) will provide a focus for some of my argument). I shall examine, too, the paradoxes which surround the contemporary debate about Pre-Raphaelite 'poetic' painting. Was it simply opposed to the recording of physical facts of'Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelitism', to the 'dull realism of Millais'? The 'poetic' form of Pre-Raphaelitism was perceived by some critics as preferable to the earlier 'Ruskinian' form because it could be construed as making visible an alternative religious argument. Pictorial 'poetry' revealed the invisible rather than replicating the visible world.This emphasis ­apparent in the use of term 'poetic' in religious art criticism at the end of the nineteenth century - set an agenda for criticism of the Pre-Raphaelites in the twentieth century. IT HA D BEEN A FANCY of the artist to paint her standing in this very room, and to make his background a faithful reproduction of the pictured walls. I am afraid the young man belonged to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, for he had spent a most unconscious time upon the accessories of this picture - upon my lady's crispy ringlets and the heavy folds of her crimson velvet dress. (Lady Audley's Secret. Mary Braddon, 1862) As the hugely popular sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret suggests, by the I 860s a popular conception of the Pre-Raphaelites and their subjects was well established, and readers of magazine literature knew precisely how to decipher the image of Brotherhood. In Braddon's novel, the link between the eponymous heroine and the style of her portrait foreshadows unconventional femininity: Lady Audley is a bigamist and a murderer who is finally declared insane. This paper will discuss the different ways in which the discourse of the Pre-Raphaelites circulated in middle-class magazine literature. Despite the general opprobrium towards the avant-gardism of the Brotherhood 'officially', traces of the Pre-Raphaelites abound in shilling monthly family magazines. Apart from discussing literary texts, I will consider a number of visual images which were influenced by and nodded to a Pre-Flaphaelite 'style'. WRITING THE PRE-RAPHAELITES T HE WORKS OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITES were reproduced in various forms from the earliest days of the PRB, and reproductions have both reflected and affected shifting views of the group's significance. Millais has been reproduced probably in larger numbers and a greater variety of ways than any other member of the group, and this paper will look at which of his works have been reproduced when, and how.The reproductions under discussion will range from the crude, sometimes caricatural wood-engravings that appeared in journals when his paintings were first exhibited, to the polished mezzotints that were published after carefully selected works as his reputation rose, to the illustrations in articles and books on the artist, to the colour prints that appeared as magazine supplements and advertising posters, to the museum-shop prints and postcards of today. MALCOLM WARNER (Center for British Art, Yale University) Millais in Reproduction 19 STRAND IV THE TRANSATLANTIC IMAGINARY: NATIONS,VALUES, PRACTICES John Beck (DanA/in College, Cambridge) and Sue Wragg (University College, Northampton) The long history of transatlantic crossings, literal, metaphorical and ideological, has generated a culture of complex affiliations and prejudices, creative misreadings and outright appropriations. Until fairly recently, however, these exchanges were dominated by the Eurocentric assumptions which underpinned the development of art history and other academic disciplines, and which appeared blind to the ways in which European practices were forced to reinvent themselves in a 'New World'. Such assumptions also ignored the inflexions produced in existing 'American' cultures by their contacts with Europeans. This strand aims to explore the relationships between the visual cultures of the Americas and Europe, and the discourses which have framed them from early modern encounters to current practices. T HE NOCTURNAL PAINTINGS of American expatriate James McNeill Whistler are based on an aesthetics of negation that appears designed to frustrate the Victorian expectations for a clear image, a narrative story, and an explicit moral. When asked to explain one of the moonlit nocturnes of Battersea Bridge, Whistler would only respond, 'As to what the picture represents, that depends upon who looks at it.' Whistler's radical subjectivity placed the responsibility of making meaning squarely on the viewer and made his art an open receptacle of widely ranging values. To English art-writers of the I 870s and '80s, the sketchmess of Whistler's art bore testament to a lack of serious effort and serious content; it was the sign of artistic indolence. Whistler was a 'coxcomb' and his nocturnes a bad joke at the viewer's expense, 'a pot of paint' flung in their faces. Three charges were levelled repeatedly against Whistler and his work by his English contemporaries: the paintings were not sufficiently serious; they were sketchy and unfinished, even inscrutable; and Whistler and his work were eccentric. Across the Atlantic, the artistic and critical reaction to Whistler was radically different. Whistler's triumph among American artists was so complete that by the late I 880s a low-keyed tonalism was virtually a mainstream aesthetic. Critical acclaim was also swift in coming. Like their English counterparts, American critics perceived Whistler's work as extremely sketchy, and lacking a meaningful subject, but whereas these qualities were reviled by the English critics, they were praised by the Americans as evidence of a high-minded transcendent spirituality.This paper will explore the American critical reaction to Whistler and discuss why the sketchiness of his work was greeted with such enthusiasm by a people renowned for their work ethic.The paper will demonstrate how patriotic, religious, philosophical, and even personal values contributed to the American remaking of Whistler from a coxcomb into a mystic. J AMES MCNEILL WHISTLER HAS a surprisingly privileged place in Pound's canon of great artists. Although Pound repeatedly denigrated impressionist painting, he reappropriated Whistler as a proto Vorticist, the inspiration behind formalist art. Pound also represented Whistler as the archetypal American artist, who managed to supersede his nationality and achieve international recognition - exactly what Pound himself aspired to do. This paper will examine Pound's early interest in Whistler, looking at unpublished essays he wrote about Whistler in 1906, and following his portrayal of Whistler in letters and published articles through to 19 16.1 am particularly interested in Pound's writing on Whistler in 1912 - a critical year for Pound's poetic career In March of that year, he visited the Whistler exhibition at the Tate Gallery, and was delighted to discover that he could read Whistler's work as a sequence of experiments which document his struggle to achieve a modern art. Pound wrote a poem about the exhibition, 'To Whistler: American', and in a series of articles about America's cultural heritage published later that year he compares Whistler to Walt Whitman and Henry James, finding that it is the artists, rather than the writers, who presents the most appropriate model for his own ambitions. Throughout this paper I will be exploring the problems and possibilities of taking a visual artist as a model for a poetic career, and the implications this had for Pound's poetic style. I will think about the complicated notions of nationality and internationality that Pound's prose and poetry sets up, particularly in relation to his equally ambiguous conception of modernity. LENORA MOFFA (University of Dallas) Coxcomb into MysticWhistler and American Values REBECCA BEASLEY (Queen Mary and Westfield College, London) Ezra Pound's Whistler 1 THE TRANSATLANTIC IMAGINARY: ADELINE JULIA SCAR BLUEMNER (1867 - 1938) was born in Prenzlau, a small (University of La Sorbonne, Paris) Prussian town. He trained as an architect at the Kdnigliche O Oscar Bluemner and the American Avant-Garde CHRISTINE BOYANOSKI (Birkbeck College, London) The Cultural Decolonisation of 'British North America' Technische Hochschule in Berlin; he emigrated to America in 1892 followed an argument on art theory with Emperor William II. He became a naturalised citizen of the United States in I 899. Despite his attraction to painting, he worked as an architect in New York and became a professional painter only when he became acquainted with Alfred Stieglitz in 1908. Being part of the Stieglitz circle helped him to discover contemporary art and also to develop his own style. Bluemner adopted a philosophical attitude towards painting; he was mainly interested in the theories of colour and started to write his own Principles after having studied the work of theorists such as Odgen Rood orWilhem von Bezold. He called himself 'the vermillionaire'. This paper will explore the artistic evolution of Oscar Bluemner as part of an example of an American avant-garde artist. It will examine how American artists, particularly those who were part of the Stieglitz circle, discovered European art, through exhibitions at the 29 I Gallery and other galleries and through European magazines such as Der Sturm. Artists often undertook a European tour to study contemporary European art in depth. It is important to note their reactions to their European experiences in order to understand how they integrated them into their own work.This paper will also examine their artistic production whilst in Europe and the reaction of the public to their art. Stieglitz's painters were primarily landscape painters. Consideration will be given to the assimilation of European styles into their own brand of American imagery through the study of Oscar Bluemner's work. O NE ASSUMPTION THAT HAS BEEN MADE about the relationship between the visual cultures of the Americas and Europe is that European practices and aesthetic traditions were received and adopted uncritically, and sometimes incompletely, in the new world. But even during periods of colonisation, local factors particular to each new land affected the ways in which European ideas were taken up. One could argue that cultural dependence had always been selective, but this selective dependency became even more pronounced as independent nations grew out of colonies. Canada, known as British North America before Confederation (which suits this discussion that does not deal with French Canada) ceased to be dependent solely on British practices much earlier than her Antipodean sisters. Her location, in close proximity to the United States, encouraged a greater independence or freedom to choose from a variety of artistic sources, whereas Australia and New Zealand were more limited. Her critical viewing public was more sophisticaed than it was sometimes given credit for a fact evident in the response to exhibitions of British art sent to Canada by the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists after World War I. for example. Yet cultural ties with Britain persisted well into the twentieth century partly due to the fact that key positions in Canada's cultural infrastructure were held by anglophiles. which helped form the critical environment. This paper explores what happens to culture in a country once dependent on Great Britain, during the process of decolonisation. Far from being a linear development, the process is complex, involving remissions and revivals - at times falling back on familiar ties, at others, rejecting them in the pursuit of an imperative national ism. Two moments of contact between Canada and Great Britain will be considered: the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924) and the exhibition, 'A Century of Canadian NATIONS, VALUES, PRACTICES Art' held at the Tate Gallery in 1938, in order to assess the state of decolonisation across the Atlantic at a crucial period in their cultural relationship. T HIS PAPER WILL EXPLORE the way in which the Precisionist artist Charles Sheeler dealt with the impact of the 'Machine Age' on the individual subject. Sheeler's work is regarded as central to the developing aesthetic of the Precisionist movement - an integral component of the emergent American modernism - and as &n sa. rly attempt to differentiate the American experience of modernity from European modernism. In order to understand this mechanism of appropriation, experimentation and differentiation I propose to return to, and re-evaluate Adorno's aesthetic theory.This theory - a project concerned with the consequences of capitalism for the subject and subjectivity - presents itself as an original perspective on Precisionism's early attempts to articulate the American subjective experience of modernity. Furthermore, understanding of Precisionism has been articulated in purely art historical terms; this paper is an attempt to address the lack of theoretical criticism concerned specifically with Precisionist works. This paper will focus on two of Charles Sheeler's works: Self-Portrait (1923), and View of New York (1931). Neither image has the referent of the title: Self-Portrait lacks Sheeler in the accepted form of the self-portrait and in View of New York. New York is missing. An additional problematic is the role of Sheeler's own photography as source material for this work. His manipulation of both mediums raises questions surrounding the missing or invisible elements of the finished works. What I propose to discuss, with reference to Sheeler's works and to Adorno's theory of mimesis and authentic subjective experience, is this problem of invisibility: How does one paint the invisible? Can we as viewers experience the invisible? I want to suggest that a (re)turn to mimesis might offer itself as a means of beginning to understand these types of questions. Mimesis, for Adorno. is not only just a receptive process but, crucially, an active one: an activity that might elucidate questions such as what can be discerned about the invisible, about the subject and subjectivity, about the ability of the works to raise a critical consciousness, in this instance, of modernity and modernism, in the artist and viewer ON 10 MARCH 1960, John Rothenstem, director of the Tate Gallery, held a press conference at the Drake Hotel in New York City.To the assembled press and art world officials, he announced the formation of an American branch of the Friends of the Tate Gallery, incorporated in the United States as a non-profit making organisation, similar in tax deductible status to that of leading American museums.The sole purpose of this new Society was the acquisition of a small but select collection of American art for permanent display at the Tate Gallery in London. It turned out to be more select than Rothenstem ever intended. Only one work. MarkTobey's Northwest Drift (I 958) was purchased by the Tate's American Friends. My paper will trace the story of that work's acquisition in 1961 to its current position within the Gallery's collection. While once a sought-after 'new American painting',Tobey's painting has spent nearly twenty-three of the last twenty-six years in the Gallery's store. By focusing on Northwest Drift's changing status, I hope to expose the processes and interests which underpin the 'art' and 'art history' displayed at the Tate. Previous studies have argued that in the late 1950's, European art institutions including the Tate merely acted as repositories for the model of modernism produced and sent abroad by the Museum of Modern Art, MARK RAWLINSON (University of Nottingham) Mimesis, Subjective Aesthetic Experience and the Invisibility of Modernism: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and the Precisionist Charles Sheeler JENNIFER GORDON (Independent scholar) The Tate's American Friends 13 HELEN REES (University of Manchester) Art Exports and the Formation of National Heritage in Britain, 1882­ ANNE MASSEY (Southampton Institute) The Imagined and the Real: The Creative Partnership of Lawrence Alloway and Sylvia Sleigh THE TRANSATLANTIC IMAGINARY: New York. Following this argument, it would seem that during this period, the Tate's Trustees were simply in the business of replicating rather than making art history. My paper would challenge this popular belief. It will show that in the late 1950's and early 1960's, the Tate was not simply reproducing MoMA's paradigm, but participating in a complex, transatlantic dialogue about the new American painting. IN NOVEMBER 191 I, the Board of the National Gallery, London, appointed a Sub-Committee ofTrustees to conduct an 'Enquiry into the Retention of Important Pictures in this Country'.The focus of concern was what had become known as the 'Old Master question' - that is to say, the apparently incompatible ambitions of vendors, the British state, and the National Gallery in the face of an increasingly competitive market in Old Master paintings. New and wealthy collectors - primarily, but not exclusively, from the United States of America - were creating an escalating demand for such pictures, and the collections of the British land owning families provided a ready supply.The result was a discernible and, to the British art establishment, alarming increase in the pace of art exports. However, responses to the transatlantic art trade were neither uniform nor predictable. Roger Fry commented that 'the American side of this vexed question is by far the brightest... It is excusable for Englishmen to resent the acquisitiveness of these magnates, but no one in his senses can deny that by the employment of their vast powers they are doing national service to their own country'. For Henry James, 1895 was 'the age of Mrs Jack', his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner whom he described as 'the American, the nightmare' and whom he compared with the barbarian at the gates of Rome. Fourteen years later, in 1909, James wrote a comic play entitled The Outcry in which he satirised the attitudes towards the ownership of works of art of a proud and unworldly English aristocrat, the Earl of Theign, and an acquisitive American tycoon, Mr Beckinridge Bender Evidently, James believed that a contemporary audience would not only recognise, but would also relish the comic potential of his mise-en-scene.The subsequent success of a nouvelle based on the play suggests that moral and economic implications of the transatlantic trade in art had indeed entered the currency of contemporary popular culture. This paper will map the historical events that inspired James's play, and thus investigate how the associative discourses of art and naxionhood were activated by the export of paintings in the years before the First World War. Finally, I will suggest that the response(s) in Britain to the activities of American collectors, such as J. Pierpoint Morgan, Henry Clay Frick. Isabella Stewart Gardner and John Graver Johnson, revealed deep- seated tensions within the British cultural state. T HIS PAPER WILL EXPLORE the complex relationship which the British art and film critic, Lawrence Alloway and British feminist, figurative artist Sylvia Sleigh enjoyed with each other and with America. Taking an approach informed by material culture and issues of class, gender and marginality, Alloway's first exhaustive tour around America in 1958 will be examined by means of the letters he wrote to Sylvia Sleigh and his published writing of the time. Visiting New York. Chicago. Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, Alloway found his imaginings about America - gleaned from Hollywood films, science-fiction comics and adverts back in London - to be more than confirmed. Drawn 24 NATIONS, VALUES, PRACTICES back again in 1960, he recounted with alacrity by letter to Sylvia his meetings and heated conversations with leading members of New York's vibrant avant-garde. Alienated from the mainstream London art scene throughout the late I940's and I950's (due in the main to his comparatively humble origins) he found unfamiliar acceptance and respect in New York. Writing to Sylvia on I 3th May 1960, he enthused: 'Contact with people like Barney (Barnett Newmann) and Bill Rubin - and of course Clem (Clement Greenberg) - who talk long and hard and seriously about art, is very good. It makes me feel more as if I were doing something serious than I sometimes feel in England. So writing-wise I feel good'. Lawrence Alloway and Sylvia Sleigh settled in New York in 1961.They rarely missed England or the deep-seated prejudices or shared assumptions which seemed to permeate the London art world. In America their creative lives flourished. Alloway continued to produce his incisive writing on film and art whilst occupying prestigious posts at the Guggenheim Museum and the State University of New York. Sylvia Sleigh painted her sensuous and provocative nudes in their lower Westside den; both supported by the bohemian culture of New York and their love for one another. Both enjoyed recognition for their innovative work ­something which could never have happened in England. IOHN C.VAN DYKE is best known today as the author of a number of I books about the landscape of the American West. He was, however an basterner, a professor of art history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and a scholar of the European tradition. Peter Reyner Banham is one of the prominent architecture critics of the post-war period; he also wrote a book about the American deserts. What business do these art critics have with the American Southwest? One transposes the aesthetic theories of an Englishman (Ruskin) on to an American landscape, the other comes to an American space already encoded in the European imagination through American culture. Both are employed as art historians yet neither, when in the desert regions of the Southwest, intend to write books of art history.They do, however write books about perception and its formation by natural phenomena. The Southwest seems to be, in both cases, already inscribed as a site of aesthetic meditation before they arrive; indeed, this is the reason they go there and not somewhere else. So it seems that the Southwest has something to do with art which cannot be found in contemplation of representations of it. It is not the Southwest as the subject of pictures that is of interest - it's hard to find particularly interesting paintings of the American deserts. It is that the desert offers a phenomenological site for scrutiny of the ontology of the aesthetic experience itself.There is. of course, also the fact of its emptiness, so the contemplative individual can become immersed in the experience uninterrupted by human contact. In this, the desert offers conditions not dissimilar to those necessary for the bourgeois contemplation of art. This paper explores the motivations behind Van Dyke's and Banham's work on deserts, how European theories of aesthetic value function in constructing the American landscape, and how that landscape and its own history of habitation offer alternative aesthetic positions to that of the detached spectator. JOHN BECK (Darwin College, Cambridge) Art History in the Wilderness: John C. Van Dyke and Reyner Banham 25 STRAND V RETHINKING CULTURAL VALUES IN GERMAN ART, 1900-1999 Colin Rhodes (Loughborough University) and Erich Ranfft (Independent scholar) This session aims to explore and question the construction and modulation of values in German visual culture from around 1900 to the present, from the perspective of manifestations within Germany itself and their reception and impact internationally. Themes include: configurations of (post) modernity and neo-conservatism; the extent of influence of 'expressionist' values across Europe before 1940; the impact of German culture, especially in the United States, as a result of emigration since the 1930s; the impact of iconic figures as a reproduction of cultural values; and changes in critical and historical approaches to the study of German culture. Papers will cover a wide range of practitioners and media, from painting and sculpture through architecture, film, photography, and text. I N THIS PAPER I SHALL ARGUE - from the perspective of the scholar outside of Germany - that the first decade of our century was a crucial period for the formation of two oppositional ideologies which had a profound impact on the rhetoric of the future: the aggressive nationalism of the Empire and the concept of an all-embracing cosmopolitanism within the modern movement. As the discourses of nationalism and the languages of culture were not mutually exclusive but complementary, they contributed to a dynamic process that intertwined the increasingly chauvinistic nationalism of the Reich with the energetic forces of cosmopolitanism.Two positions that were articulated by Friedrich Meinecke in Cosmopolitanism and the National State (1907) and Harry Graf Kessler in his essay 'Nationalitat' (1906). By charting the construction of a Utopian cosmopolitanism for the production of culture I shall demonstrate that this international sphere for the arts was chiefly promoted by those who were intensely engaged in the theories and practices of modernism, such as Max Liebermann, Alfred Lichtwark, Hugo vonTschudi, Meier-Graefe, Kessler; and Walter Rathenau. However; I shall argue that these canonical figures of art historical writing embraced the modern movement as outsiders (Jews, foreigners, men with homoerotic attitudes) who were virtually compelled to construct an international space for their manifold activities. As events in theThird Reich would demonstrate, the potential identification of modernity with the outsider had an ominous effect on Nazi politics in the arts. A S THE MAJOR MOTIVATION for founding the German Expressionist artists group Brucke in Dresden, in his 'Chronicle' of the group in 1913, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner identified '... the possibility of studying the nude, the foundation of all pictorial art, in free naturalness.' Indeed, even a cursory overview of the works of the Brucke quickly confirms that the nude human figure, and most frequently the nude female figure, viewed in highly varied circumstances and locations, is numerically one of the most dominant motifs treated by the artists. Such prioritizing of the human form as subject matter its identity in Kenneth Clark's words as 'ideal form,' is readily recognizable, of course, as continuing long traditions of Western European painting and sculpture, and necessarily opens up a range of issues concerning gender and sexual roles, attitudes and politics. It is my intent in this lecture to review critically how Brucke's gendered imagery has been evaluated and perceived during the past ninety years in a variety of ideologically revealing responses that shift and transform the artists' imagery to meet changing criteria. IN 'THE WORK OF ART in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility' I Walter Benjamin considers the effects of new conditions of production and commerce on the response to visual stimuli and on the structure of works of art, contrasting reception characterized by 'aura' with that characterized by 'distraction,' the gaze of the (bourgeois) art lover with that of the working 'expert'. By focusing on the notion of the 'expert,' this paper seeks to plot new coordinates by which to map the complex conceptual work involved in Benjamin's theses.The 'expert' was a key figure in the radical retheorization of cultural values in Weimar Germany, one implicated in the crisis of the traditional intelligentsia as well as in processes of professionalization that affected fields from the arts to the sciences. Both Benjamin and those close to him in the constructivist avant­garde felt the pressures of new conditions of intellectual work, and traces of this can be found in the essay. There is also evidence of another process to affect the nature of thought in modernity: as objects of knowledge came to be approached with narrowly defined professional concerns, both the origins and uses of the knowledge produced inevitably FRANCOISE FORSTER­HAHN (University of California, Riverside) Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Germany's Search for Identity REINHOLD HELLER (University of Chicago) 'The nude, the foundation of all pictorial art, in free naturality':The Critical and Historical Reception of Sexuality and Gender as Content in the Work of the Kunstlergemeinschaft Brucke. FREDERIC J. SCHWARTZ (University College London) The Eye of the ExpertWalter Benjamin and the Avant-Garde RETHINKING CULTURAL VALUES tended to fall into the blind spots of professional vision. By studying his contact with and borrowings from bodies of professional expertise, this paper will question the extent of Benjamin's awareness of changing conditions of knowledge in the twentieth century. IAIN BOYD WHITE (University of Edinburgh) The German City in the Twentieth Century: the Aesthetic Imperative BERND NICOLAI (University of Edinburgh) The Myth of Monumentalism: Megalomania, Destruction and Virtualism in National Socialist Architecture I N A TEXT WRITTEN during the First World War and ultimately published in 1919 as Die Stadtkrone, the Berlin architect Bruno Taut described his vision of the city crown, a vast glass temple that would cast a benificent glow over the city below: 'The glowing light of purity and transcendence shimmers over the carnival of unrefracted, radiant colours. The city spreads out like a sea of colour as proof of the happiness in the new life'. In the late 1990s, the Berlin planning group Planwerk is again proposing primarily visual strategies as the vehicle for urban planning, with the City-Knoten assuming the ordering functions of the city crown. Between these two proposals, German urban design theory is littered with plans that reflect aesthetic, rather than pragmatic imperatives, ranging from Otto Kohtz's skyscrapers for the Konigsplatz, Berlin, to the functionless hulks flanking Albert Speer's North/South Axis.This paper will investigate these strategies, which appear to support the Nietzschean dictum: 'Only as an aesthetic phenomenon does existence and the world appear to be eternally justifiable' (Birth ofTragedy). I N HIS ESSAY, 'Hitler according to Speer', Elias Canetti emphasized the fact that architecture was not only fundamental for the representation of Nazi power but also a personal request of Hitler himself. It was the frustrated artist who demanded a new architecture, according to the new construction of the 'Reich'. Eternity and duration were what he had in mind; the vision of a new pharoah, commissioner of the pyramids of the 20th century.These buildings, almost all designed by Speer using Hitler's own sketches and drawings from 1925, would have been the framework for the ordered masses. Hitler thought in categories of competition and wanted the new Berlin to outdo the other main metropolises like London, Paris and New York.This clarifies why Hitler had a great interest in the propaganda of the new architecture, which was presented not only in illustrated books and journals and in exhibitions, but even in movies. Because of the fact that these projects were only partly carried out this architecture has a strong affinity to what we nowadays call 'virtual architecture' - one which only works in a different media within a special political context. Since 1974 scholars have adapted a critical approach to NS-architecture, stressing that monumentalism and the NS-dictatorship are inseparable. Monumentalism in Germany has a negative connotation. Why does nobody care about monumental buildings in Washington. London, or Paris which are comparable to Speer's projects? Is there a special tradition of monumentalism in Germany, which always has political overtones? In this issue Speer's and the GDI-architecture has to be analyzed within the framework of public building culture dating back to the beginning of the century, when A/lonumento/kunst became popular.There is a deliberate lack of monumental architecture in post-war (West) German architecture. However since reunification and the construction of the new governmental quarter in Berlin - located in the same place as Speer's Great Hall and the Fuhrer-Palace, the question of the new monumentalism has again become the topic of debate. 15 IN GERMAN ART, 1900-1999 T HIS PAPER EXAMINES the extensive discourse in Germany and the United States on German exile art from the Third Reich unleashed by the 1997 exhibition and catalogue Exiles and Emigres: the Flight of European Artists from Hitler This often contradictory and ahistorical discussion focused primarily on the aesthetic quality of the artworks and ignored the inherent cultural ambivalence of German exile art. Postwar engagement with this work has been instrumentalized by nationalist interests and cultural political ideologies. Between 1949 and 1989 the discussion emphasized autonomous art of high aesthetic quality, on one hand, and antifascist art of the 'better Germany' on the other It took German reunification to effect a paradigm shift. Emergent approaches included the historicization of exile art, the demythologization of its historiography, and the investigation of intercultural aspects. Critical response to the exhibition, however, reverted to advancing German exile art as a form of cultural capital. Within Germany, exile art was also characterized as both universal and individualistic. By separating it from the explosive problem of Germany's coming to terms with its past, this approach prevented a synthetic evaluation. In the U.S., German exile art was used to legitimize autonomous, apolitical art.The validation of the modernist canon and the devaluation of political art were fortified by the notion of this exile standing at odds with high artistic form. The German-American discourse, which so strongly resists a revaluation of German exile art, is significant and interesting because the events of the period since the 1930s still define both nation's political and cultural identities, as demonstrated by the current debate in Germany about the much desired 'normality' of the new Berlin republic. O N THE WHOLE, art historical research on colonial identity has been driven by accounts of its impact on modernist primitivism in western avant-gardism.This dominant narrative occludes the role played by official culture and its meanings in the colonies. In I 884, Bismarck declared that the establishments of the Bremen merchant Adolf Luderitz on the coast of South West Africa were under the protection of the German Empire. Whether further annexations of territory were the result of domestic considerations or the consequence of 'social imperialism' has been vigorously debated in historical accounts of the period.Though the protectorate itself came to an end in 1915 with the conquest by South African forces, the symbolic structures of German annexation have persisted to this day in various forms - monuments to the Schutztruppe, churches, town planning, publications and Trivialkunst.This paper examines how these traditions have been preserved and how they coexist with efforts to forge a post-colonial Namibian identity. Reinscription of the German legacy is all the more interesting in view of Namibia's efforts to free itself from the yoke of South African domination, independence having been achieved only in 1990. F OR MOST FILM HISTORIANS. German cinema is primarily associated with two distinctive periods and movements, the so-called 'Expressionism' of Weimar cinema, and the politically engaged 'New German Cinema' of the 1970s and early 1980s. It is my contention that the critical focus on these two movements has created a reductive and misleading perception of German cinema.The assumption that German cinema represents (or should represent) a primarily high cultural medium has led to a blanket dismissal of traditions of popular culture, and has disenfranchised the majority of German audiences. Probably even more problematic is the critical discourse by which German cinema is seen as a direct reflection of an assumed collective national psyche . Drawing on my SABINE ECKMANN (Independent scholar) German Exile Art and the Discourse on its Aesthetic Value SHULAMITH BEHR (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Reinserting German Colonial Identity: from the South West African Protectorate to Post-Colonial Namibia TIM BERGFELDER (University of Southampton) German Cinema: Myths and Histories 19 own research into popular German film genres, my paper will develop a different approach which questions the notion of a nationally 'pure' cinema (and culture). My argument will focus in particular on the international nature of film industries and markets, and cross-cultural influences and interactions. ASTRID IHLE (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Modernity, Decay, and the Loss of Utopia -Three Generations of GDR Women Photographers: A discussion of the work of Evelyn Richter, Gundula Schulze el Dowy, and Anett Stuth BRIDGID DOHERTY (Johns Hopkins University) Media in Germany: Darboven and Fassbinder SILKEWENK (Carl von Ossietzky-Universitat Oldenburg) Commemoration in the Service of German unification - The Controversy about the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and Public Art in Germany after 1989190 T HIS PAPER WILL DISCUSS different patterns of socialisation in and generational experience of GD R society as articulated in the work of three women photographers - Evelyn Richter (b. 1930), Gundula Schulze el Dowy (b. 1954), and Anett Stuth (b. 1965) - who distinguish themselves through their intensive and consistent exploration of the conditions of human - and in particular female - existence in the GD R and reunified Germany.Their photographic practice, respectively, which describes different moments in East German history - from the consolidation of the East German state to the disintegration and breaks of the Honecker era, and, finally, the 'Wende' and German reunification - will be analysed within the shifting social, political, and cultural framework of 40 years of GD R society, taking into account issues of generational conflict, 'tradition' (in terms of continuity and change), as well as patterns of socio-historical and political transformation which effect conditions of photographic production and reception, and not least meaning. My contention hereby is that gender (both before and behind the camera) functions as a 'prism' (Einhorn) through which cultural processes and values can be analysed and critically re-assessed. T HIS PAPER FOCUSE S O N the contemporary German artist Hanne Darboven's 1982-83 work, Fur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and provides an analysis of the relation of the several media of Darboven's art to Fassbinder's cinematic medium. Fur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I argue, itself "rethinks cultural values in German art, 1900-1999" by assembling and juxtaposing on pages inscribed with Darboven's wordless wavelike script and her calendar-based permutational counting a range of materials representing episodes in twentieth-century German history. Produced soon after Fassbinder's death in 1982. Fur Rainer Werner Fassbinder ­which consists of some 90 framed pages and a large, freestanding wooden cross decorated with images of Jesus Christ, a photographic portrait of a German WWI I infantryman, and a picture of children in volkisch costumes - builds a memorial to the German filmmaker and provides a critical response to the representation of history in his films, making its subject emblematic of the difficulties and controversies concerning the representation of German history in visual culture since 1945. T HE DEBAT E ABOU T the planned 'Memorial for the murdered Jews in Europe' in Berlin is going on.The paper will discuss the implications of the concept for the memorial in the (rebuilt) centre of the capital, the artist's proposals from the first and the second competition and the fundamental problems and contradictions of the objective itself. 30 STRAND VI ANIMALS IN ART: IMAGES AND CONTEXTS Matthew Craske (Oxford Brookes University) and Fiona Russell (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds) This strand will be devoted to a discussion of the presentation of domestic animals in art and material culture. Its principal concern will be the representation of animals in three-dimensions - embracing everything from marble Academy sculpture to taxidermy - but will also include discussions of two-dimensional form.The strand will aim to generate a debate on the issues surrounding our relation to domestic animals, a subject, which touches many central socio-historical concerns. Issues which spring to mind include the expression of national debates, questions of human sympathy, humanity and control, and the formation and perpetuation of gender identity.The strand will preface an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds on the memorialisation of the domestic pet, which will take place in summer 1999. ANIMALS IN ART MATTHEW CRASKE (Oxford Brookes University) The Role of the 'Cult of Sensibility' in changing Attitudes to the Death of Domestic Animals in England ANTHEA BROOK (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Seafood Soup and a Taste for Nature: the Animal Life of Pietro Tacca. FIONA RUSSELL (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds) The Taxidermical Sculpture of Charles Waterton STEVE BAKER (University of Central Lancashire) The Postmodern Animal M Y SUBJECT WILL BE the analysis of sculpture set up in commemoration of domestic animals in mid-Eighteenth Century Britain. I argue that such monuments are very rare before this date and their proliferation is owing to the emergence of the literary cult of sensibility. Monuments of this type frequently have a humorous air; the intent being to mock the pompous conventions of funerary art employed in commemoration of humans. Epitaphs to thoroughbred dogs and horses were commonly intended to poke fun at the rhetoric of fine breeding and genealogical boasts of human funerary art. Verses and tombs to dead birds often set out to parody the sentimental excesses of ladies of fashion, such trifling concerns being ridiculed by those who regarded themselves as men of the world. Whilst monuments and epitaphs to animals may tell us much about the changing attitudes to the pet, they tell us more about attitudes to human mortality and responses to death which are obliquely discussed through this new genre of communication. P IETRO TACCA, who succeeded Giambologna as court sculptor to the Medici court in I 608, played an important role in the transition between mannerist and baroque sculpture in Florence. At the turn of the century the tide of taste was turning against mannerism in favour of a revival of naturalism, which was enthusiastically embraced by Tacca, whose study models after animals were said by his enemies to have been cast from nature.The sculptures of animals which approximate most closely to this type are his bronze turtles for the obelisks in Piazza S. Maria Novella (I 608) and the naturalistic plant base for his bronze cast after an ancient marble boar which swarms with animal life.Tacca was perhaps most celebrated for the monumental rearing horses of his equestrian portraits, and his casts of The Lobours of Hercules also include wonderful images of animals. His pair of fountains in the fashionable grotesque style created for the seaport of Livorno display a variety of marine life and so were nicknamed the 'Fontane del Cacciucco' after the name of the popular Livornese seafood soup. T HIS PAPER WILL EXAMINE the work of Charles Waterton, the 19th century 'wanderer', naturalist, writer and taxidermist. Waterton was an exceptionally skilled taxidermist whose pioneering technique was adopted by noted naturalists including Charles Darwin but his taxidermy also served other, darker purposes. As a disenfranchised catholic nobleman and as an increasingly desperate critic of industrialisation, Waterton used taxidermy to created strange composite animals and mis-en-scene. My paper will explore the ways in which these taxidermical 'sculptures' (Water-ton's own description of them) engage notions of the natural, the beastly, the political and the foreign, and also the positioning of his 'sculptures' by Waterton in the house and grounds of Waterton Hall. W HEN ANIMAL IMAGERY in art still risks derision from a lingering modernist perspective which views it as kitsch, sentimental and anthropomorphizing, and when the physical presence in the gallery of anything from a live coyote to a preserved tiger shark is now scarcely thought-provoking, let alone alarming, it may be that the extremes of irony, bestiality and butchery with which some artists have framed their domestic animal imagery in order to render it 'serious' are less than surprising. Such imagery, however, is indicative of contemporary art's difficulty in addressing how humans continue to live closely with animals, and of its failure to see that the pet - John Berger's compromised, improper animal - might even, in its very impropriety, constitute an exemplary and eminently thinkable postmodern animal. 3: IMAGES AND CONTEXTS T HIS PAPER SEEKS to examine the relationship between Gaudier­ Brzeska's two and three dimensional practice, and, in light of thetheme of the session, sculpture and animals, concentrates particularly onhis sketching work in the zoo and in parks. Three central themes underpin the talk.The first is the description of Gaudier as an 'animal' by his contemporaries and subsequent biographers. I will argue that this 'animal' personality sets an important precedent for the subsequent reception of his work and its relationship with the 'primitive'. Secondly, Gaudier's sketching method and technique will be assessed.The work from c. 19 I I provides us with a fascinating case study in terms of the development of his style, away from the Rodinesque towards the 'primitive' and the 'Vorticist'. It will be suggested that this development reveals the core element of Gaudier's sculptural project - a spanning of the 'primitive' and the 'modern'. Animals, in Gaudier's iconography, function as a transhistoncal device, allowing him to address atavistic and primitivist concerns in a modern visual idiom.This ties in closely with the sculptor's self-perception as an 'urban primitive'. Lastly, I will take time to consider how these ideas translate into three dimensions, particularly with reference to sculptures such as 8/rd Swallowing a Fish, Stags and Imp (all 1914). I N THIS PAPER, I address the relationship between the iconographic representation of dogs and certain specific aspects of the interaction between dogs and humans during World War I and just after Animal representation in art or written texts, particularly as it relates to human values is much more paradoxical and contradictory than has usually been considered. Nor has it been often enough the case that such iconography has been related to the specific and peculiar context of human/animal relations. My examples focus mainly on the use of dogs during the war especially after 1916. and the place of dogs and other animals on war memorials in the 1920s and early 1930s. T HE PAPER EXPLORES the moment when it became possible to photograph animals in nature. In contrast to the picturesque nature photography of the 1860s the early animal photographers attempted to capture wild animals in their habitat.Their struggles to overcome the difficulties inherent in photographing wild animals led to the invention of a number of techniques for photographing animals. Among these was the photo blind, a canvas covered shell in which photographers hide so as to be able to take pictures of birds without the birds sensing their presence. I take this apparatus to be paradigmatic of the issues involved in early wildlife photography.The taking of animal photographs, predicated on their subject being unaware of their taking, places their subjects in a realm outside all domesticity.The photographs depict animals as being outside all human contact. Yet the animal's depiction for humans is also their domestication; photography symbolically appropriates the animals for human use.The tensions between these two moments of the animal photograph result in a mythic notion of the wild animal, one outside all human contact, which represents the untamed spirit in every person.The photographs thus present their subjects as being outside all domestication while domesticating them as compensatory objects for nostalgic identification. JON BLACKWOOD (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) , Gaudier-Brzeska s Animalier Sketches JONATHAN BURT Faithful Dogs and Images of Death around World War I MATTHEW BROWER (University of Rochester) Shooting Blind: Early Animal Photography and the Photographic Blind 33 STRAND VII VALUES IN RENAISSANCE ART Gabriele Neher (University of Nottingham) and Rupert Shepherd (Independent) We intend to examine the artistic, cultural and economic values associated with visual culture in a period when relations between the visual arts and humanistic studies were undergoing rapid change: the Renaissance in European art, c I 300-16900, both north and south of the Alps. Papers will discuss the values placed upon different forms of artistic production, the change in value of the artist's work, the relationship between the patrons and the works they commissioned, and the critical values of and within Renaissance art. We hope to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to the Renaissance as a cultural phenomenon, which embraced the visual, literary, and other arts. R ENAISSANCE GUILD REGULATIONS and contracts relating to painted works of art consistently emphasise the quality of the metal leaf and certain pigments used in their production.Their value was not only symbolic, transferred by association with elements of the themes commonly depicted: these materials, which included the blue pigments ultramarine and azurite, and certain red lake pigments, were the most expensive and the most likely to be falsified or substituted by something cheaperThey also maintained their value relative to other pigments throughout the period. Gold and silver were intrinsically valuable; so was lapis lazuli, the source of ultramarine, because of its scarcity. In addition, the expense of the pigments can be related to several constant factors. The raw materials from which they were obtained were largely imported, following easily disrupted trade routes.The quality of the source materials (in the case of the blues) or insect and plant dye stuffs (in the case of the red lakes) fluctuated.The methods of extraction in the first case, and manufacture in the second, were laborious.These contributed towards the price of pigments that could account for a substantial part of the overall cost of the work. D ESIGN AN D DESIGNERS were praised from the moment Francesco del Cossa was termed a mastro al d/segno in the days following his death in 1478, and probably before.The appreciation of design and drawing led to the collecting of specimens of draughtsmanship by the leading painters and sculptors of the day, as works of art in their own right. This paper will examine how these works then accrued extra value by their translation into other media. It was sometimes important that the new work was intrinsically valuable, if it were made of precious metal for example. However value might also be added by the difficulty of the technical process of transmission, a hitherto neglected aspect.Thus, by the sixteenth century, there existed a category of object commissioned, collected and valued both for the invention contained within it, and for the particular skills of a second artist in transforming this invention. D E HOLLANDA in his Roman Dialogues (1548) indicates the discrepancy Renaissance artists perceived between their artistic achievement - equalling that of the ancients - and the appreciation of their works by contemporaries. Increasingly artists questioned whether a non­practioner was competent to judge the intrinsic merit of a work of art. Benvenuto Cellini valued the praise of fellow-artists for his Perseus more highly than verses composed on it by academics, slightingly comparing the views of 'huomini intendenti' with the chattering of birds. Similarly, Anton Francesco Doni argued for an appreciation of art based on 'the understanding of draperies' rather than the academic understanding of 'efficient causes'. It was the sixteenth-century paragone arguments comparing painting and sculpture which revealed this conflict by creating an unprecedented forum for artists to raise formal concerns which distinguished their understanding of aesthetic worth from that of the theorist or connoisseur. Drawing on their practical experience of the difficulty of working in both mediums, artists advanced a set of criteria by which they judged a work of art to be successful; so that regardless of how you defined 'disegno' theoretically it could be seen in a boldly foreshortened pose or the gracefully continuous contours of a statue. JO KIRBY (National Gallery, London) The Price of Quality: Factors Influencing the Cost of Pigments during the Renaissance LUKE SYSON AND DORA THORNTON (British Museum, London) Difficulty and Invention: the Value of Art Objects in Early Sixteenth Century Italy. BENTHOMAS (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) Artefici and Huomini Intendenti: Questions of Artistic Value in Sixteenth Century Italy 33 VALUES IN RENAISSANCE ART STEPHEN CAMPBELL (University of Michigan) Mantegna's Parnassus :Mythic Invention, Natural Philosophy and the Value of Painting EVELYN WELCH (University of Sussex) New, Old and Second-Hand Culture: the Case of the Renaissance Sleeve BARBARA PEZZINI (Apelles Collection, London) Filarete and Filelfo: Architecture, History and Politics in Fifteenth Century Milan H OW AND WHY did mythological painting emerge as a distinctive genre at the North Italian Courts of the later fifteenth century? Recently, discussions of Renaissance mythological imagery have polemically engaged the question of textual evidence for contemporary understanding of mythological imagery, especially with regard to the role of 'earned advisors' in the shaping of pictorial meaning,This paper will re-evaluate the humanist context for the paintings for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este in Mantua, in particular the contributions of Andrea Mantegna, by locating them within: a) traditions of Este mythological imagery; b) humanist conceptions of the relation of verbal and pictorial invention, and of the status of pagan mythology; c) the context of viewing within the space of the studiolo, the site of activities which include not only the collecting and viewing of objects but the reading and discussion of texts. It will be proposed that mythological painting arises from an increased awareness by humanist scholars and poets of the potential value of the image as a mode of disclosing an investment in poetic language and in the pagan past about which their more verbal pronouncements could not afford to be explicit. T HEORIES OF CONSUMPTION have proved attractive yet highly problematic for Renaissance art historians. Originally formulated on the basis of evidence taken from the eighteenth-century to the present day, questions concerning the consumer and the marketplace can seem either irrelevant or even misleading when applied to an earlier period.Yet the benefits of such a model are numerous. Above all, it permits a revaluing of a range of goods such as textiles, embroidery, saddles or cutlery, objects which are usually ignored in traditional discussions of Renaissance art.This in turn permits a better understanding of the place which painting and sculpture occupied in this world of luxury goods. This paper takes one case study, that of court clothing and textiles in fifteenth-century Italy, to suggest ways in which current theories of consumption can be modified to the benefit of Renaissance studies. Exploring goods which women such as Paola Gonzaga, Eleanora d'Este. Anna Sforza and Lucrezia Borgia owned and adapted, it emphasises that a new purchase was only one of the many ways in which valuable commodities (such as the highly valued sleeves which were attached to court garments) were bought and sold in the Quattrocento. Gifts, exchanges and remodelling or re-use were equally important means of obtaining something novel. Women, who often lacked financial wherewithal to commission or to pay for new goods, proved particularly adept in this often forgotten world of second-hand consumption and culture. T HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the architect Antonio Filarete and the humanist Francesco Filelfo will be examined by comparing Filelfo's mentions of Filarete in his letters and literary works with the references to Filelfo in Filarete's Treatise on Architecture. Where the recent scholarship on Francesco Filelfo is ample, his interest in the visual arts and his link with Antonio Filarete are still unexplored. Filelfo's references allow us to gam new information on the life and works of Filarete. as well as make some observations towards Filelfo's attitude towards the visual arts. 3c VALUES IN RENAISSANCE ART IN FLORENCE, paintings of ancient histories were produced to adorn furniture and were incorporated into wall panelling in patrician homes. In addition to acting as signifiers of Florentine patrician cultural values they express complex - and sometimes contradictory - attitudes towards ancient history.They are as important as the exhaustively studied humanist histories for an understanding of how the ancient world was perceived in the Quattrocento. Apollonio di Giovanni was one of the few painters to receive humanist praise. Ugolino Verino famously called him 'the Tuscan Apelles1 and admired his paintings of ancient histories. However Apollonio's pivotal role in creating a vocabulary and style for the visualization of ancient history has not been recognized fully. Successive painters adopted (and adapted) his approach and motifs in the visions of ancient Israel, Rome and Greece that dominated the repertoire of patrician domestic decoration. In this paper I shall examine fifteenth century visual histories of The Rape of the Sabine Women and Esther and Mordecai to demonstrate how enduring Apollonio's models proved. His ability to meld a variety of intellectual responses to ancient history into one coherent image was emulated by all later Quattrocento domestic painters, and demanded by their patrons. No study of fifteenth century Florentine culture should ignore these complicated visual histories of the ancient world. I N THE RENAISSANCE some images attracted a truly mass audience. I From the end of the fifteenth century a spate of new shrines, such as those at Prato and Montepulciano, drew large crowds of pilgrims anxious for a glimpse of a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary. What are the implications of this holy ratings war for our understanding of value in Renaissance art? What kind of value is placed on the cult images by the pilgrims, and how does this relate to the valuing of 'art' both by contemporaries and by ourselves as historians? Vasari's story about the crowds going to see Leonardo's cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St. Anne exhibited at the Annunziata in Florence as if going 'to solemn festivals' recognizes pilgrimage as a benchmark for awed and attentive viewing.This paper will suggest that a consideration of image-pilgrimage is essential for a balanced view of value in Renaissance visual culture. T HIS PAPER TAKES AS ITS CENTRAL FOCUS a number of late fifteenth-century woodcut images of Saint Catherine of Sienna. It considers the relationship between these and surviving panel paintings and frescoes painted for the Dominican order in Renaissance Tuscany. Its starting point is the National Gallery of Scotland painting of Saint Catherine as Spiritual Mother of the Second and Third Orders, which is attributed to Cosimo Rosselli, and traditionally associated with the Dominican community of San Domenice del Maglio. Although woodcuts are commonly neglected in Renaissance studies, it is argued here that they contributed significantly to Renaissance culture, and specifically to that of women in religious communities. It is further argued that such images were particularly suitable for the private devotions of such women. A number of woodcut images are considered against the background of the organization and religious sphere of female religious communities, and more specifically in the context of the printing press set up by the Dominican nuns of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Via della Scala. Florence. Consideration is given to the standardization of images of Saint Catherine and the printing activities of these women. CAROLINE CAMPBELL (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) Revaluing Renaissance Art: Cassone Paintings and the Telling of History in Fifteenth Century Florence ROBERT MANIURA (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Voting with their Feet Art, Pilgrimage and Ratings in the Renaissance ANABEL THOMAS (Birkbeck College, London) Images of Saint Catherine: A Re-evaluation of Cosimo and the Influence of his Art on the Printed Imaging associated with the Dominican Order 37 O PICINIUS DE CANISTRIS is perhaps best known as the subject of Ernst Kris's study of a 'psychotic' artist (1952).The dominant trend in scholarship upholds this view, making it very difficult to evaluate his artistic output. My paper will examine the value of cosmological speculation during the Italian Trecento, in relation to his drawings. Opicinius; artistic production appears less unusual when viewed within a larger social context that includes the work of Brunetto Latini, Dante and Piere Bersuire, all of whom were drawn to study the cosmos as part of a speculative/visionary frame of mind. I locate Opicinius's drawings within an ongoing debate that was taking place in the fourteenth century about the role of the senses, imagination, reason and the conscience, in relation to the realms of the visible, which of course includes the visual signs of the Physical universe. Although Opicinius's drawings can be more sensitively understood as a result of knowing more about his particular social and intellectual context, these images remain on the border between madness and mysticism. T HIS PAPER CONSIDERS Tintoretto's Construction of the Golden Calf, the lower portion of the monumental painting at the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto,Venice. It explores the secular forces that contributed to the iconographic framework and compositional rendering of the image. It suggests that changing Venetian understanding of the value of gold and its semiotic relationship with the Jews of the Ghetto underpinned sixteenth century readings of the paintings.This construction demonstrates the painting as a warning to the Venetian viewer of the dangers of misguided earthly values. 38 STRAND VIII PHOTOGRAPHY AND VALUE Mark Durden (University of Derby) The history of photography in many senses attests to photography's shifting status and value. This strand will critically examine such shifts, paying particular attention to the way in which claims are made for the medium's aesthetic worth in the face of an originary context which valued the photograph on more utilitarian grounds. Papers will critically examine the early history of photography, photography's value in its relation to the pictorial traditions of painting, lithography and book illustration. Alongside such historical investigations, this strand will also involve curators, artists and critics reflecting upon photography's recently elevated value within the contemporary art scene. PHOTOGRAPHY AND VALUE FAY BRAUER (University of New South Wales) Inscribing the Normal and the Abject Body: Photography at Saltpetriere Clinic and the Eco/e des Beaux-Arts O NCE JEAN-MARTIN CHARCOT became head of the Neurologic Clinic at Saltpetriere Hospital, its photographic laboratory came under the direction not of a doctor, but a 24-year-old professional photographer - Albert Londe. Reorientating Marey's chronophotography into medical photography, Londe was not only instrumental in formulating Charcot's iconography of hysteria but also, from I 888, in developing a Nouvelle Iconographie de la Saltpetriere .This new iconography, published annually until 1922 by Londe, in collaboration with neurologist, Dr. Paul Richer represented an attempt to chart through what Londe called Photographie Moderne, diverse forms of physiological and pathological deformity. Within Neo-Larmarckian and Neo-Darwinist discourse, this modern photography of illnesses ranging from the vicissitudes of syphilis to neurasthenia, all seemingly testified to the sapping of Bergson's 'I'Elan vitale' - the decline of the vital energy of the nation. Yet in keeping with the clamour for national regeneration, the antithesis to this deformed, abject body simultaneously emerged - through physical culture photography. Modelled upon Eugen Sandow's Institutes of Physical Culture in London, Edmond Desbonnet designed schools in France with physiological exercises which could, he claimed, actually repair tissue, make muscle and generate physical strength. Promoted through such journals as La Culture Physique and his many books like La Force Physique, as a rational exercising method which could bring health to all kinds of bodies - regardless of physiognomic or racial difference - and presented as the perfect antidote to degeneration, these schools were immediately successful. With modern sports, physical drills and body-building mediated by these schools, in tandem with physical culture photography and discourses, the healthy body became the normal body. Whilst both Londe and Richer were inextricably involved in photographing and promoting this physical culture and this normal healthy body from the 1900 Olympics, drawing upon the same models as Desbonnet, Richer was in a strategic position to do so across the fields of art and medicine. As a medical collaborator of Charcot and his successor Raymond; as Lecturer in Anatomy at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, from 1905. member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts. Richer effectively blurred distinctions beween art and medical photography through his extensive deployment of Londe's photography of both the deformed, abject body and the modern, normal body in the life-class, the Salon des Artistes Francais and in the clinic.Through an examination of Richer's roles as neurologist, artist, art teacher and academician, his collaborations with Londe and their relationship to the physical culture spawned by Desbonnet, this paper aims to reveal the roles played by photography in inscribing normalization and abjection across the body. PAT RIZIA Dl BELLO (Birkbeck College, London) Melancholic Portrait Gazers: the Waterlow Album, Maternal Fetishism and the Value of Photographic Prints. T HE WATERLOW ALBUM, from the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection of Prints and Drawings, compiled between approximately 1850 and 1870 by Anna Waterlow (1824 - 1880), is an early example of the emerging genre of albums dedicated exclusively to family photographs, before they became common with the expansion of the carte de wsite format.The contents consist mainly of portraits of Anna Waterlow's immediate and extended family, successful Unitarians from London. Her husband Sydney Waterlow, a printer in the family stationery business, went on to become Lord Mayor of London, a Liberal MP and a rich Baronet. The photographs are taken by an amateur who remains anonymous but appears to have been close to the family, perhaps Anna's sister Mary Hickson. and are too sparsely captioned to be of much historical value. For all their detailed and realistic quality, photographs give very little 4C PHOTOGRAPHY AND VALUE information on the actual circumstances and feelings of the persons involved, yet they can create peculiarly convincing narratives, in this case of happy and pleasurable motherhood. I am using this case study to question the value of an 'ordinary' nineteenth-century family album, especially once it has been detached from its original family and its oral traditions. Is it possible to speak of 'family photographs' without turning them into 'charming illustrations' to social history, yet without trying to make excessive or irrelevant claims for their aesthetic value? I also want to consider the value that these images would have had as photographic prints, even when 'unsuccessful', beyond their novelty and availability as cheaper and faster alternatives to miniatures and painted portraits. Drawing on feminist approaches to the history of visual culture, and theories of maternal and photographic fetishism, the paper aims to historicise and give value to maternal photographic sentimentality, to show how Victorian women, rather than being the passive consumers of a new industry, recycling meanings created elsewhere, were able to use photography as a way to give body and substance to culturally and socially specific desires, pleasures and aspirations. I PROPOSE TO DISCUSS the effect of early photography in altering I awareness of how an image (or a 'copy') might be 'mechanical' and how it might also be 'expressive.' Familiarity with photography on the part of both art critics and the public affected the evaluation of painting during the later nineteenth century, especially painting that entertained some claim to 'realism.' Certain techniques of painting, such as those of Cezanne and Seurat, relate to photography in somewhat surprising ways.The links between nineteenth-century photography and nineteenth-century painting, established in the critical response to the two media (which often compared them), illuminate aspects of the late twentieth-century use of photography by such painters as Chuck Close and Vija Celmins.These contemporary artists have stressed the base materiality of the photographic image (the potential for failure in its mechanism), even as they make paintings that often seem to suppress the visible action of the hand - its own material presence. T HIS PAPER WILL EXPLORE the paradox, or perhaps more correctly the 'non-synchronous dialectic', of a modern form of representation(photography) made out of an eighteenth-century aesthetic.The paper will r , i ,. , , , n, • L. . rn focus on popular photographic literature of the I 860s. considering the writings of, amongst others, William Lake Price, H.R Robinson and Alfred H. Wall. A central question to be addressed will be why the theory and practice of Sir Joshua Reynolds remained the touchstone for English photographers at least until the beginning of the twentieth century. On the basis of this discussion, it will be argued that, in contrast to much nineteenth-century academic art. photography became the place where a significant allegorical impetus that had underpinned 'Neo-Classical' aesthetics retained its charge. A number of photographs of street musicians, apparently belonging to a very different aesthetic tradition - that of picturesque street characters - will be considered. It will be suggested that while images such as these are now routinely viewed through the lens of 'power-knowledge' they might be better read as tropes figuring the troubled relation of the photographer to 'the poor'. Read from the perspective of a mid-nineteenth century Reynoldsian photographic practice these images, far from being critical, reveal the pyschomachia of a petty bourgeois subject. RICHARD SHIFF (University ofTexas) Mechanism and Materialism in Photography and Painting STEVE EDWARDS (Open University) _, _ _ . . . , The Organ Grinder and the Monkev a ' DAVID EVANS (Surrey Institute of Art and Design) Putting Soviet Photography in its Place T HIS PAPER WILL EXAMINE the changing status of photography in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.The most extravagant claims for the importance of photography came from within the October Group (1928 - 1932). It was assumed that the photograph was superseding the easel painting, in the same way that the theatre was being made redundant by cinema. Both new media, it was argued, were the most appropriate cultural forms for the new civilization being created by Stalin's Five Year Plan. Such views became hard to reconcile with what gradually evolved as Socialist Realist positions on the visual arts in the mid-30s. Painting was re-instated as the pre-eminent creative practice, whilst photography was ascribed a more modest role as craft - useful, important even, but not to be confused with art.These changes will be explored through a detailed examination of the illustrated magazine The USSR in Construction. JOHN GANGE (Kent Institute of Art and Design) Photography's General Economy T HIS PAPER WILL DISCUSS George Bataille's notion of depense, of a general economy exorbitant to use-value, in its impact on questions of aesthetic value. Bearing in mind that Rosalind Krauss, amongst others, has utilised Bataille's writing, particularly his term mforme, in her reading of Surrealist photography and other visual practices, the paper will ask whether this appropriation of Bataille is reconcilable within the framework of the broader terms of a general economy. Does Bataille's discourse refuse the possibility of aesthetic value per se? If irreconcilable with notions of use, exchange or surplus values, is photography inherently implied into a general economy? If so, what problematics does this present for an aesthetics of photography? MARK DURDEN (University of Derby) The Tableau versus the Document Photography in Contemporary Art. T HIS PAPER WILL EXAMINE the importance of photography to contemporary art practice. In particular it will examine photography's value in relation to questions of 'realism' in contemporary art. In opposition to the somewhat iconophobic and theory-led photo practice of the early 1980s, contemporary photography - often large in scale and in colour - celebrates the power and spectacularity of images. Yet such work is marked by an essential conflict concerning photography's ontology. On the one hand there are artists who continue to use and exploit photography's more traditional documentary role and on the other those who distance themselves from the instrusions of such a documentary mode. Such artists instead make recourse to the tableau and stage reality effects.Through discussion of the differing work of such artists as Jeff Wall,Tracey Moffatt and Alfredo Jaar I want to consider some of the implications of this conflict. STRAND IX EVALUATING SCULPTURE: PATRONAGE, PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION Amanda Crosswell (Independent scholar), Johanna Darke (Public Monuments and Sculpture Association), Gillian Whiteley (University of Leeds) 'Do plastic Venuses tell lies?' The sculptor Edward Allington's explorations contest traditional notions of the 'authentic' original and the 'nobility' of particular materials. Recently sculptors have worked with the notion of the simulacrum, eschewing marble and bronze in favour of objets trouvees, plastic, cardboard and thin air. The strand will explore changing sculptural values from the classical to the millennial post-modern: specifically the patronage of recent sculpture, the reproduction of sculpture, and the cultural and commercial value of sculptural works. Also addressed will be questions of the market and its effects on sculpture, questions of production and after-care, and the contemporary values attached to sculpture in world culture. EVALUATING SCULPTURE JOHANNA DARKE (Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) Public Monuments, Outdoor Sculpture Symbols as Objects ANDREW NAYLOR (Public Monuments and SculptureAssociation) _ , , . The Good, the Bad and the Ugly T HE STATUE OF LIBERTY is a whole lot of copper - what would she be worth after a meltdown? She is a symbol of course - perhaps the symbol of America, Land of the Free. And she is also a great belvedere whose views, after we have climbed her 45-metre interior, reach over the mighty Hudson from Manhattan. Designed by Bartholdi, she was constructed in 1881 by the company of the engineering genius whose name lives in the Eiffel Tower, that other great lookout and symbol non­pareil. Most monuments and statues are put up as symbols but endure as something other, perhaps valued solely (and appropriately) as a piece of great art, but more often - whether of marble by a great artist or of flaking limestone by the local mason - taking on a separate and unintentional value.The public turns them into landmarks, or picnic sites, or trysting places, and lays claim to them as objects that mark the common ground. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's steel-built Bottle of Notes in Middlesbrough must rate as a first-class climbing frame, pace the artists' reservations (voiced in their talk in Middlesbrough on the day of the Bottle's inauguration in 1995); Paolozzi's massive bronze foot, erected outside the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Edinburgh, has become the perfect children's slide: the rush of small bottoms since 1992 is surely causing this work's erosion whilst being highly effective in burnishing its five metres of bronze. The Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, in its national survey, is learning to re-evaluate Britain's public sculptures and monuments in terms of Social and Local, as well as Art, History and to shrug off the tired question 'but is it art?' | T MAY BE GOOD, BAD OR UGLY: whether or not a public sculpture lis conserved depends on the value attributed to it.This paper is an examination of some of the themes of the strand from the perspective of my own specialisation, the conservation of public sculpture made of metal. Value is defined in my dictionary as 'the desirability of a thing in respect of usefulness or exchangeability' and other key words are worth, merit, importance. Value is attached to a huge number and variety of sculptures but the process of ageing, change and decay is unstoppable and irreversible, the best that conservators can aspire to is to slow down the process and reveal the nature of the object to allow observers to make their own individual interpretations, their own value judgements. Insensitive or ill-informed conservation damages, changes, removes or obscures information that the viewer needs. I shall use specific examples from personal experience to illustrate the effects conservation of public sculpture can have on - the re-evaluation of historical sculpture - the devaluation of historical sculpture - myth and partiality attached to the 'unique' original - the implications of funding - popular perception of public sculpture - the community value of public art - production and after-care of contemporary sculpture ELIZABETH NORMAN (Sheffield Hallam University) CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE that is sited in a public place is rarely free from some form of informal evaluation ­ whether prior to. in Public Art, PublicValues? progress of or even some time after the sculpture's placing. Evaluation of public art by the public is often immediate, direct it is based on what is seen or imagined. PATRONAGE, PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION In a pioneering study of public art, The Benefits of Public Art, formal evaluation is included in a set of recommendations for public art.There is a need for clarity of intention in any given project, namely 'how decisions are made, who makes them and for whatever reasons'. Clarity on these points, Selwood claims, will assist or 'inform' whatever evaluations are made. However, decisions involving public art are complex, stretched by both aesthetic positions and community needs. Can the decision-making process be made more transparent? In this paper I would like to explore the possibility of achieving Selwood's clarity of intention by looking at decision-making following an approach used by a discipline which makes decision-making its study. While an extra disciplinary enquiry is not particularly unusual given the now inclusive nature of our discipline, I suggest the choice of discipline is both unusual and sensible. A branch of the management sciences, Community Operational Research aims 'to use OR techniques and approaches to assist community and voluntary sector groups in their planning and decision-making'. Community OR identifies a number of issues relevant to such an undertaking: the agenda, management, the involvement of people, representativeness, diversity of views, dilution of community action. All of these issues are relevant to public art, particularly new genre public art and its commitment to community participation. Using such a breakdown, the conduct of a project can be seen in broad management terms, planning and leadership. Such an approach is possibly too prescriptive for the arts, but public art might do well to allow its issues to be stated in a different way and to permit a more systematic scrutiny and analysis than it has yet had. R OSCOE AND HIS CIRCLE initiated the Liverpool tradition of enlightened patronage, sympathetic artistic influence and judicious collecting that has culminated in Liverpool's status as a major artistic centre. In this paper I will examine Liverpool's status as a cultural site, and discuss Roscoe's position as patron of artists, his role as founder of early cultural institutions in the city and his association with three sculptors: one who had chosen to work in Liverpool for commercial reasons, and two who were born in the city.The critical reception of their Liverpool work will be analysed in the light of local political and commercial realities. All three moved away and found diverging success elsewhere. I will look at changing artistic values in sculpture, even within a short space of time in the 19th century, consider medium, process and the status of the artist.The question of conditions of success for sculptors in early 19th century will be discussed with reference to regionalism.These issues will be examined with Roscoe's perspicacious purpose for Liverpool in mind and their ramifications for the present. S O THEY PULLED DOW N THE STATUE of the Happy Prince. "As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful," said the Art Professor at the University.' The recent renovation of the Albert Memorial in London has focused attention mainly on the curation of public monuments. But not far behind lie hitherto largely unanswered questions involving the Memorial and the production and meanings of its sculpture programme, let alone the physical and aesthetic problems posed by some of the materials used.This talk will try to answer some of these questions. ANNE MACPHEE (University of Liverpool) William Roscoe's Engagement with Sculptors in Early 19th Century Liverpool BENEDICT READ (University of Leeds and the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) The Happy Prince? 45 EVALUATING SCULPTURE IN THE SUMMER OF 1927 as the building was rising on its site on the Millbank, Sir Frank Baines, the architect of Imperial Chemical House, suggested to Sir Alfred Mond.the Chairman of the recently formed ICI, that sculpture was required for the 'completion of the external facade'. He proposed 'four great chemists' or 'four great industries'. What followed was a slightly farcical competition and a greatly expanded set of ideas for sculpture, including a huge pair of doors with carved bronze panels in the manner of Ghiberti.This paper explores the development of these ideas, involving sculptors, architect and patrons, and examines the final products, the four 'great industries' by Charles Sergeant Jagger the portrait heads of 'great chemists' (plus the Chairman and Vice-Chairman) by W.B. Fagan, and the bronze sculpture on the doors also by Fagan. C HARLES WHEELER'S SCULPTURE for the Bank of England has long been forgotten. Recent histories of inter-war architectural sculpture have been highly selective, featuring the canonical stars but ignoring other artists whose sculpture was recognised as idiomatically 'modern' by contemporary commentators. The lengthy and controversial process of rebuilding the Bank of England began in 1922 and continued into the 1940s, during which time the Governor and Directors of the Bank became considerable patrons of decorative and fine arts under the guidance of the architect, Sir Herbert Baker. In a pamphlet of 1939, Herbert Baker wrote 'the artistic policy expressed in the architecture of the new Bank has been a continuity in change; a sense of permanence in progress.'The stylistic tension between Wheeler's facade carvings and Baker's classicised architecture is interesting. Is this merely emblematic of the conflicting influences that advanced academics such as Wheeler attempted to unite in a new figurative syntax, or might it reveal a positive desire for the Bank to express its own modernity? I hope to answer some of these questions. T HIS PAPER IS CONCERNED with reproductions of sculpture in eighteenth-century British collections. Scholars generally evaluate such collections as the Earl of Leicester's or the Earl of Rockingham's as pursuits appropriate to gentlemen engaged in 'improvement' and displays of their erudition. I am specifically interested in the plaster casts and copies after antique and Italian sculpture that were acquired by a group of young British gentlemen in the 1750s. Extensive collections were amassed by the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Huntingdon, the Duke of Charlemont and William Locke of Norbury.The group, as such, were young Whigs who would return from their Grand Tours in the middle of the 1750s and all would command a formidable presence in the often intersecting political and aesthetic realms of English society.This paper will explore the political ramifications of these sculpture collections and the shifting 'values' accorded to an individual reproduction, a reproduction within a collection of reproductions and a collection that was amassed in mid-eighteenth century Britain. This paper will focus on the Duke of Richmond's collection displayed in Richmond House in Whitehall from 1758.The Duke's collection had an additional dimension in that it also served as an academy, albeit short­lived. I will examine the individual casts and copies in the academy as very early examples of the Winckelmann aesthetic in England.The academy was conducted by Joseph Wilton, who had been an active participant in the Winckelmann-Albam circle in Rome and then Florence and who also was responsible for supplying most of the young English Whigs with copies and casts.The Duke's academy will also be discussed as an attempt by the Duke to fill the gap in royal patronage of the arts under George II; the Duke was touted as Britain's Young Maecenas.The demise of the academy will also be examined in the same light -6 PATRONAGE, PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION F ROM ITS TRADITIONAL STATUS and function as the material of the academic atelier, the Salon and the plaster cast hall (the gypsotheque of Georges Didi Huberman), this paper will address the reappraisal of plaster, in the 1930s, as a working material and as a medium bearing important cultural and commercial value. Viewed in the context of the 1920s - of emergent neo-classicisms and of a declining art negre - plaster will be read as having been assigned new meanings outside its central function of reproducibility.The whiteness and the versatility of this material will be seen to have been appropriated by artists such as Brancusi, Picasso and Giacometti, in different, yet related, ways: from the material par excellence of assemblage (the fuser and the fused), and the material of both carving and modelling, to one with a chicness pertinent to contemporary Parisian interior decoration. Finally, the bestowal of a poetics of 'uniqueness' and authenticity' upon this material, will be seen as coinciding within the pragmatics of these artists' studios and their working practices. Indeed, I will analyse this, by extension, within the photographic reproduction, and presentation within contemporary publications, of Picasso's Boisgeloup, Giacometti's 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron and Brancusi's 'white' studio at I I impasse Ronsin. S INCE ANTIQUITY, SCULPTORS in the Western world have chosen to work with bronze and marble for the noble associations, classical overtones and intrinsic preciousness of such materials.This fundamental relationship was undermined early in the 20th century by Picasso's constructions of cardboard and Schwitters' Merz made from refuse and everyday ephemera. However, at the end of the 1950s and in the following decade, the resurgence of every possible material for sculpture ­urban waste, junk, breath, shit - may have contested more than just intrinsic or artificial values associated with particular substances. As art objects became increasingly commodified and the art market more commercialised, artists sought out the most 'worthless' of raw materials. In the early 1960s, the perverse activities of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni ensured that their patrons literally had nothing to show for their purchase. This paper will examine the transformation in the use of materials for sculpture in that particular period, focusing on assemblage and wider sculptural practices associated with it in Europe and America and will consider the relationship of such developments in the wider social, economic and political context. B RITISH SCULPTURE OF THE I980S has achieved unprecedented international success and is particularly noted for its return to the making of objects, the innovative use of materials and the foregrounding of meaning.The term 'New British Sculpture' has been used to describe these developments of the early 1980s and to encompass a loose grouping of artists whose work and concerns emerged out of the London art schools and the specific circumstances of Britain in the 1970s. This paper will focus on the emergence of this sculpture in Britain in the late 1970s and the ways in which its newness was constructed and informed by fierce debates about art and its social role.Through specific works, produced from 1979 to 1982,1 will argue that New British Sculpture directly confronted and engaged with the conditions of modernity in a post-industrial, multicultural climate where issues of progress, production and consumption, and Britain's changing relationship to Europe and America, were central. Furthermore. I will show how the process of art making embodied these concerns and explored social and cultural values in a shifting, post-modern age. JONATHAN WOOD (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Plasters of Paris: Brancusi, Picasso, Giacometti and the Poetics of Plaster in the Early 1930s GILLIAN WHITELEY (University of Leeds) Junk, Funk and Empty Space: Trashing Material Values in the 1950s and 60s. FRAN LLOYD (Kingston University) Re-thinking 'New British Sculpture' of the I 980s and the Making of Meaning STRAND X ARTISTS' LIVES: BIOGRAPHY AND INTENTIONALITY RE-EXAMINED Annie Richardson and Andrew Kennedy (University of Southampton) This strand presents papers on historical formations of the artist and categories of artistic identity, and on theoretical approaches to the figure of the artist in the discipline of art history. A combination of historical, critical and speculative analyses is intended to produce a debate about the ways in which art history currently handles and constructs the artist. New approaches to biography and intentionality are also included. T HIS PAPER WILL CONDUCT a critical analysis of the biographical treatments of Velazquez's working years in Seville, I 617-1 623.This will draw upon the writings of Pacheco (17th century), Palomino (I 8th century) and 19th and 20th century histories.The relative absence of primary sources for this period is a problem for any biographical study. Therefore the textual roles performed by certain recurring terms and tropes in these biographies need to be examined.This will be conducted through considerations of their significance to the contemporaneous surroundings ofVelazquez. Velazquez's 'nobility' is a key question.This term recurs in biographical treatments and needs to be explored in the context of his apprenticeship to Pacheco and later employment at the court of Philip IV. Does his later career affect the writing of his initial years in Seville? In approaching these historical questions attention will be turned towards the Seville oeuvre. Questions of style and genre will be directed towards a development of an understanding ofVelazquez's engagement with Sevillian painting and patronage.The works will be viewed as of a master painter rather than examples of juvenilia. It is intended that this will both develop a knowledge ofVelazquez's early career and set out methods for its further study. T HE ONLY KNOWN SELF-PORTRAIT of Antonis Mor, signed and dated 1558, is used to consider the representation of the artist's artistic identity.The focus is on the way the portrait defines the artist through his relation to two 'significant others' represented through two inscriptions in the portrait: Dominic Lampson, friend of Mor and leading member of a humanist circle of artists and art-lovers based in the Netherlands, and Mors royal patron, Philip II of Spam. The paper argues that Lampson and Philip II are incorporated into the self-portrait as alter egos in accordance with the classical definition of a friend as a second, ideal self.The paper also considers the ambivalent power-relations between artist and writer and artist and monarch, the tensions within concepts of art and artist consequent upon the Netherlandish adoption of Italian art discourse, and how these are inscribed within the self-portrait.Taken in conjuction with Mor's departure from the court after an incident in which he reportedly challenged the monarch's authority, the portrait is read as an assertion of the painter's identity as liberal artist and gentleman which, despite the image's claims to the contrary, ultimately came into conflict with the social and material status of favoured court servant.The fractured identity represented is related to Mor's situation as an artist who worked within both the Spanish Hapsburg court and an educated Netherlandish urban elite on the eve of iconoclasm and revolt. G AINSBOROUGH'S LETTERS will be used to investigate the construction and presentation of an artistic identity and the interface between the personal and professional.The letters will be viewed as a means of reflective literary self-fashioning, nuanced according to the category and status of the recipients, and drawing on historically and culturally situated character-types and ideals.The paper will focus in particular on Gainsborough's consistent use of terms suggesting playfulness, inconsistency, eccentricity and ignorance in his passages of self-description, and the way he uses these to validate and explain his engagement with the 'lower' genres of portrait and landscape. Ultimately it will aim to explain Gainsborough's continued presentation of an unstable self with reference to a range of biographical, cultural and social factors. Firstly, the paper will examine the style of the letters and the literary personae of those writers with whom contemporaries compared JEREMY ROE (University of Leeds) A Study of the Seville Biography of Velazquez JOANNA WOODALL (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Portraiture as Biography:Antonis Mor's Self-Portrait ANNIE RICHARDSON (University of Southampton) The Artist at at Play: Gainsborough's Letters 49 RICHARD WENDORF (Boston Athenaeum) Reconstructing Sir Joshua ANDREW KENNEDY (University of Southampton) William Daniell and Richard Ayton -Panoptic versus Romantic Subject in '.he Mapping of the Nation ARTISTS' LIVES: BIOGRAPHY & them, particularly Lawrence Sterne. Secondly, it will consider the ways in which the letters articulate the discourses and practices of art, particularly their construction of the relative values of the genres and notions of visual pleasure.The intersections between the discourses of art and other discourses of identity such as class, gender and national identity in the letters will be a means to illuminate the historical situation of the artist in mid- and late- eighteenth-century Britain. I PROPOSE TO EXPLORE the difficulties and opportunities I encountered in writing my most recent book on portraiture, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society, and then offer an alternative way of writing the book. In examining such a figure, I found myself confronted by a variety of scholarly predilections: against traditional biography, against the single-artist monograph (especially one devoted to a male artist), and against establishment figures, of whom Reynolds was a full and problematic example. At the same time, I found that I inherited a number of methodological choices, each of which was ultimately untenable: the view of Reynolds as a master of artistic accommodation, or, conversely, as an agent of the romantic will, shaping the depictions of his subjects to his own exemplary character I chose to extend E. R Thompson's 'field-of­force' model to the relationship between Reynolds and his aristocratic clientele, arguing that the society in which he flourished was itself a complicated site of intersecting forces and that the artist's dialectical relationship to that culture needed to be explored in all its untidy, even ambiguous complexity. I therefore analysed Reynolds' relation to various existing social and political structures and attempted to define a 'discourse of complacency' that would explain how Reynolds became the embodiment of those social virtues he captured in his portraits. I N THIS PAPER I WISH TO DISCUSS the constructions and self- constructions of William Daniell and Richard Ayton in relation to their illustrated topographical work A Voyage round Great Britain (8 vols, 1814­I 825).The project started as a collaboration, Daniell designing and engraving the aquatint plates and Ayton supplying the text. After two volumes, the collaboration disintegrated, in part because of disagreements over the purpose of the voyage and how it should be represented. Thenceforth, Daniell assumed responsibility for producing both text and images. In examining the differences in their respective approaches, I propose to consider Daniell's self-presentation as panoptic, rational, objective, scientific, metropolitan artist, partisan of Improvement, and Ayton's self-presentation as subjective, idiosyncratic writer a man of sympathy who is drawn to the marginal, the hidden, the disordered, in opposition to the rationalist, ordering discourse of Improvement. If Daniell's identity here recalls Foucault's archetypal Enlightenment villain, Ayton's may make us reconsider the Romantic subject as having a critical potential: Marxist critics, pre-Althusser, particularly highlighted - I believe rightly - the romantic critique of alienation under capitalism. To sum up, I believe that in this case an analysis of images and texts in combination (and in sequence) will yield fruitful insights concerning identities available to early nineteenth-century landscapists and topographers, while at the same time permitting discussion of wider theoretical and methodological issues. -YDIA O'RYAN WITHIN THE PROCESS of Art History, one can resurrect the text University of Keele) of the artist's historical, social, cultural and psychological moment in order to enable it to be represented. Previous performances have cast this Searching for Charlotte, artists' muse artist in a minor role, using her married name, Charlotte Berend-Corinth. md producer of the erotic Anita Her stage name for this performance is Charlotte Berend. ierber portfolio 1919 5C NTENTION ALITY RE-EXAMINED The themes of the first act revolve around an analysis of Lovis Corinth's upstaging of his wife's dual roles in public life as artist and Secessionist. One witnesses the structuring of Corinth's identity via Berend's incorporation into the substance of his paintings.The director interrupts the action to reposition Berend centre stage so that the production of her identity is seen as a cumulative, dialectical process. Act two investigates the patronage of Berend's graphic works by the Gurlitt Press and her participation in the male-dominated economy of'pornographic' images for the private sphere.The significance of women's social and sexual manipulation is explored but with an emphasis on modes of resistance. Act three returns to images of the female body; not Corinth's contained images of his wife but Berend's witty, subversive, sexual representations of the dancer Anita BerberThe audience is invited to come on stage, as this is a rehearsal for the continuing strategic engagement with the problematic of challenging the construction of femininities as acquiescent, one-dimensional and powerless. IN 1944, DURING THE PERIOD of her'inner exile' under the Third Reich, the Hanoverian artist Grethe Jurgens produced a small, illustrated book entitled Das Atelier. Das Atelier is an intimate portrait of the life and work of Jurgens; it is a richly layered form of autobiography and self­portraiture.Yet the volume defies traditional conventions of biography and intentionality, based as these are upon paradigms of universal subjectivity and the transparent translation of 'life' into 'work'. Dos Atelier asks us to think differently about self-portraiture and the relationship between women's art practices, biography and intentionality. In order to bring marginalised female subjectivity into view, it is crucial to reinstate the sexed and situated subject of history and discourse.This strategic move does not ignore biography and intentionality, rather it seeks new theoretical constructions through which difference might be voiced. Such alternative forms of self-articulation are embedded in Dos Atelier with its play of intersubjectivity and performed identity. Without reducing the artist's 'self to an essential unity, the volume enabled a representation of phenomenological subjectivity to emerge through the spaces of the studio. This paper explores the idea that the 'self-portrait' was an effect of the manifold instantiations of the woman as artist across the spatio-temporal matrix of the studio. T HERE ISA CONSENSUS that Eva Hesse's one-year sojourn in Germany marked a watershed, for she embarked in 1964 a painter and returned to New York City in 1965 a maker of 'objects.' I argue that her German experience provoked not only a decisive change in medium, but a shift into allegorical procedures that allowed her to work in and between the pictorial and sculptural paradigms.The drive that took Hesse's work beyond the representational possibilities of either discipline corresponded to a crisis of identity commensurate with being a child refugee from the Holocaust who lost her mother to suicide. Hesse's art confronts the lack of representational support for either the meaning of the Holocaust, or the daughter's ambivalence and desire for the mother. I propose an intersection between biographical circumstances and the formation of the subject in Hesse's work: not the sovereign subject of the pictorial paradigm, nor the phenomenological subject of sculpture, but the subject of allegorical desire.This subject is realised through a repetition that moves forward, forestalling the impetus of the death drive, and backward, returning to the site of the trauma. In considering the pervasive motif of the window (the site of the mother's suicide) biography does not reveal intentionality. but the status of the referent in a practice that moves beyond representation. MARSHA MESKIMMON (Loughborough University) Grethe Jurgens' Das Atelier: Women's Autobiography and Situated Subjectivity CHRISTINE CONLEY (Independent scholar) Reading her Desire: Allegory and the Symbolics of Loss in the Work of Eva Hesse 3 CHRISTOPHER HORROCKS (Kingston University) Machine Agency: Andy Warhol and the Contradictions of Post-Avant-Garde Identity. NIRU RATNAM (Independent scholar) Ignoring Biography, Constructing the Self and Deceiving the Others: the Artistic Career of Anish Kapoor JULIAN STALLABRASS (Independent scholar) The Identity of the 'Young British Artist' S TUDIES OF WARHOL have symbolically marked him as the apogee of the disinvestment in signs of the 'virile figure of the subject agent', pre­empting the post-modern waning of affect. He therefore marks a paradigmatic shift in the cultural framing of artistic identity, and in relations of art, artist, and world. Interpretation of Warhol's motives, and the contradictions which biographical and critical texts attempt to resolve or repress, have to deal with the conflation of identity and mask. Problems arise when Warhol's mask is taken to reveal or conceal his (true) identity. With such an emphasis on illusion and appearance, I wish to consider that Warhol's 'hexis', or his deportment or conducting, as well as his interactions (particularly with his interlocutors) are constitutive of readings of Warhol's identity. My focus is therefore on Warhol's performativity, and on the interpretation of his 'playing out' of an image of himself which is both improvised and negotiated. It is the intersection of Warhol's actions ­his 'singularities' - and their interrogation by others, and the aporia (the gap at the centre of Warhol's 'identity') which is subsequently generated, that constitutes the body of my proposed discussion. T HIS PAPER FOCUSES on the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor. It explores the construction of Kapoor as an 'Indian' artist by critics in the 1980s, and considers his attempts to avoid such biographical readings of his work. Finally it examines his 1998 one-person exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Many early readings of Kapoor's work concentrated on his Indian background, largely because of his use of pigments and forms associated with Hinduism. Despite participating in the 1980 group show 'India, Myth and Reality1 Kapoor increasingly denied that his cultural background could be used to position his artwork, in 1989 refusing to participate in the 'The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain'. The paper argues that increasingly Kapoor aimed to erase his cultural identity whilst implicitly referring to it.The main body of the paper looks at the conflict between artistic self-fashioning and critical construction, and centres on Kapoor's appearance at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Kapoor's growing interest in the void is explored as a refusal to return the coloniser's gaze, and indeed an attempt to control and undermine this gaze, a strategy which culminates in Kapoor's 1998 Hayward exhibition. T HERE ARE A NUMBER OF SUCCESSFUL ARTISTS in Britain in the 1990s who have presented themselves as media celebrities. Damien Hirst is perhaps the most extreme example in the sense that it is no longer clear whether he requires the art market to continue his career, or whether he needs to continue to make things which are sold in galleries. Hirst, Sarah LucasTracey Emin, Gavin Turk and perhaps Chris Ofili make work which feeds off and contributes to their media images. Ofili describes the dung as a 'hook', and what these artists have done is self­consciously create a brand image for themselves. Such branding has long been the concern of artists and dealers, of course, but here it has become the major theme of the work in a manner which holds out the promise of critique but also finally withholds it.The extent to which these artists are tied into the fabric of commerce, the deliberate resistance of their work to 'Theory', and the hard, resolutely external identities which their work constructs, have the potential to challenge common art-historical views of identity: conventional postmodern and psychoanalytical approaches have little to say about this work.The work's resistance to such readings has been motivated in part by institutionalisation of such theory and of art history itself into art education and art discourse. 5: STRAND XI MAKING EXHIBITIONS: MAKING ART HISTORY Fiona Bradley (Hayward Gallery), Penelope Curtis (Henry Moore Institute), Sarah Hyde (Courtauld Gallery), Liz Prettejohn (University of Plymouth) This strand explores issues around exhibitions as major centres of art-historical discourse.The scope includes exhibitions of contemporary as well as past art. Issues will include: the role of 'star' curators, critical practices in exhibition reviewing, collaborations between 'in-house' curators and academic art historians, and the distinction between collections-based institutions and exhibitions-oriented ones. The strand will consider both theoretical and practical issues concerning the interpretation and organisation of art through exhibitions. The way in which this division is often mapped onto the distinction between art historians and curators is another issue which we hope will be considered. MAKING EXHIBITIONS STEVEN GARTSIDE (University of Liverpool) Consuming Culture(s): Modern American Art in Britain RICHARD WILLIAMS (Liverpool John Moores University) Exhibitions and Non-Events SABINE MARSCHALL (University of Durban-Westville, SA) Re-defining the Canon:The Role of the Two Johannesburg Biennales (1995 and 1997) in the Formation of a New South African Art T HE ARRIVAL OF MODERN AMERICAN ART in Britain in the late !950s has been consistently referenced as a significant moment in the history of art.The Tate Gallery's displays of "Modern Art in the United States' (1956) and "New American Painting" (1959) were instrumental in producing a partial reassessment of the position of American art. This introduction of American art has to be placed within a wider debate that constructed an image of America based on myth rather than experience.The exhibitions are cited as being influential to a grouping of "younger generation" British artists, particularly associated with the R.C.A. Their use of American abstraction, though, was consistent with-rather than distinct from the consumption of a whole range of visual material taken from the mass media.The relationship of image to reception will be explored through writers such as Alloway and Banham and their attempts to view American art as part of an "anti-elitist" and "linear" view of culture. The paper will examine the exhibitions of American art in the context not just of the impact of new art, but as representative of a different culture. Their position will be considered as part of a complex set of relationships that are as much about British cultural debates as about the dissemination of American art. I N WHA T SENSE DOES A N EXHIBITION take place? What does its physical realization matter? Have some exhibitions made a play of such questions? This paper considers such questions in terms of "Nine at Leo Castelli", an exhibition organized in a warehouse by Robert Morris in 1968. Its canonical status seems assured. It was widely reviewed at the time of its appearance, whilst in subsequent accounts big claims are made for it in terms of the changing condition of modernity, or exhibition space, or both. Yet it is no easy matter to establish the facts of the exhibition: the exhibition dates vary in published accounts by up to four months, and there is similar variation in the names of the participating artists. If this factual information is obscure, it seems that both Morris and the gallery also diverted or blocked the usual channels of communication: one prominent critic complained that he had been advised to stay away, whilst historians may be frustrated by the absence of records from any archive. To find such obscurity is curious given that the critical discourse around the show centres on such highly physical questions as process. One would think that it was a show that demanded to be experienced. But given that physical experience is in various ways denied, I propose to discuss the extent to which "Nine at Leo Castelli" may be seen as a play on the exhibition form itself: what if any is the evidence for this view, whether it corresponds to any pre-existing discourse around exhibitions, and what the implications are for histories of the art of the recent past. T HE COMPLEX PROJECT of re-ordering South African art history and the gradual process of forming a new, more inclusive and more truly representative canon of South African art began in the I 980s. Publications and exhibitions, such as "Art from South Africa" (London 1990) were crucial trajectories in this process.The dramatic change of the political landscape brought about by the 1994 first General Elections in South Africa provided a further impetus and highlighted the need for the closure of gaps and correction of imbalances, the establishment of new paradigms, new stylistic and thematic taxonomies, and new criteria of evaluation for art in South Africa. 5­ MAKING ART HISTORY In this context the two Johannesburg Biennales -' Africus' 1995 and Trade Routes' 1997 - were extremely significant events. Both biennales were major international exhibitions, where a 'new South African art' was shown not only to an international audience but also - as opposed to previous overseas exhibitions - to South Africans themselves. Perhaps more importantly, in both biennales local art was exhibited alongside works from a wide array of countries in Africa and other parts of the world, thus placing South African art in a global context and reflecting the relationship of South African art to the international art scene. Nevertheless, there are significant differences between the two Johannesburg Biennales in terms of organisation, curatorship, selection, modes of display, public reception and in terms of the works of art themselves.These differences provide valuable insights into the development of South African art and the ongoing process of the formation of a new canon and a new identity in post-Apartheid South Africa. Based on a comparative analysis of the two Johannesburg Biennales and their public reception this paper seeks to investigate the influence of these exhibitions on the emerging 'new South African art' and art history. F ROM MY PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT with both small, focussed exhibitions and a major block-buster I would like to explore the issues involved in presenting the work of a single artist, James McNeill Whistler Take three reviews of one exhibition: Richard Cork on I 8 October 1994, under the headline 'Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee' saw Whistler 120 years after the Whistler v. Ruskin trial, as a minor artist who was impudent enough to attack a major art critic. Attacks on critics instigated then as now a knee-jerk reaction of denigration of the work of the artist. In France, Beaux-Arts Magazine in February 1995 announced 'Paris dEcouvre Whistler/le peintre des brouillards de Londres'.The exhibition of atmospheric Nocturnes by a relatively unknown painter was heralded as a triumph of French culture. As the creator of one great American icon, Whistler was welcomed with naive enthusiasm by the Washington Post of 28 May 1995: 'Hi, Mom! She's Here for a Visit - and a Whistler Reappraisal'. Diverse critical reactions in the 1990s mirror the responses to Whistler's exhibitions in the 1880s, while the publicity and marketing of his work by Whistler and his dealers influences and provides interesting contrasts with contemporary exhibiting patterns. T HIS PAPER SEEKS TO EXAMINE the increasingly popular concept of 'artists' interventions' in museum collections. It will begin with an overview of this practice, assessing its potential as a vehicle through which to open up debates about curatorial practice to wider audiences. It will also explore the positioning of 'artists' interventions' as either a separate discipline or as part of an integrated practice. In analysing these points, the paper will consider the following questions: How does the site-specificity of these projects and the location of the museum object in such particular contexts affect the construction of art-historical narratives in the gallery? Ownership/authorship: do 'artists' interventions' allow museums to relinquish control over the construction of meaning? How does the gallery space itself provide the environment in which artists can physically engage with the cultural values such institutions imbue? Or have 'artists' interventions' become institutionalised? Using as case studies a series of collaborative projects between the Henry Moore Institute and Leeds City Art Gallery which relate directly to the Leeds collection of 20th-century British sculpture, the paper will address the way in which Leeds has attempted to use 'artists' interventions' to create a site of reflexivity. MARGARET MACDONALD (Centre for Whistler Studies, University of Glasgow) Sting like a Butterfly.Whistler on Exhibition DORCAS TAYLOR (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds) Interventions: Re-appraising the Making of Art History through Contemporary Artists' Responses to Museum Collections' 55 PANEL DISCUSSION (double session) NICHOLAS TROMANS (Sotheby's Institute) The First British Curators? The British Institution and the Definition of the Art Exhibition CHRISTIANA PAYNE (Oxford Brookes University) The Art of Compromise: An Art Historian as Exhibition Curator MAKING EXHIBITIONS In conclusion, the paper will debate whether by encouraging artists to intervene we are simply creating a hybrid collection of artists' responses to objects in our collection, or whether these projects can have an afterlife other than as temporary engagements with the making of art/gallery history. Are 'artists' interventions' tools by which audiences can make sense of museum practices or are curators simply being self-indulgent? /V PANEL DISCUSSION featuring independent and museums- and / \galleries-based curators. Each participant will give a short presentation f -(-heir own curatorial ideals and experience, to be followed by a discussion of some of the issues raised by the session. Speakers include Katrina Brown, Dundee Contemporary Art; Lisa Corrin, Serpentine Gallery; Mark Francis, independent curator and founding director Andy Warhol Museum; Martin Caiger Smith, Head of Exhibitions, Hayward Gallery.The panel will run over two 45-minute sessions but each 45­minute session will be self-contained and may be attended independently. Q T HE BRITISH INSTITUTION for Promoting the Fine Arts played a crucial role in the development of British art-historical and museological discourses, a fact often overlooked because of the institution's failure to survive beyond the I 860s.The first British loan exhibitions of 'old master' paintings were held there in I 815-1 6.The British Institution also pioneered the notion of 'retrospective' exhibitions of works by deceased British artists, beginning with Reynolds and Hogarth in 1813-14, and including a remarkable series of shows in the I 840s which seemed to raise Wilkie, Stothard, Callcott and others to the same status of 'British classics'. Both the 'old master' and 'British classics' exhibitions took place in the summer at the same time as the Royal Academy show, while works by living British artists were exhibited in the spring. In fact the two summer categories often overlapped: the boundary between an 'old master' and a recently deceased 'British classic' was deliberately blurred.This was a cause of resentment for many who felt that the British Institution's patrician Directors and the exhibitions' Superintendent, William Seguier were taking it upon themselves to dictate the parameters not only of art-historical canons, but also of the as yet undefined competence of what was later to be called a 'curator'. This paper will examine the importance of the British Institution in defining the role of the loan exhibition in Britain. It will ask how these early exhibitions may be said to carry meaning.The history of the reception of, say, Hogarth or early Italian art cannot be written without taking seriously the role of the British Institution. Who intended to do what with these exhibitions? If this question could be properly answered, the role of the art exhibition would have a fuller history. T HIS PAPER REFLECTS on the experience of a university-based art historian as guest curator of two exhibitions: 'Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1890' (1993-4) and 'Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century British Art' (1998-9).These were thematic exhibitions with an interdisciplinary focus, intended initially for a university art gallery (the Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham), but also shown at more collections-based institutions in Britain and the U.S.A.: the Yale Center for British Art. New Haven, and Penlee House Gallery and Museum. Penzance. The exhibitions were designed to appeal both to an academic public and to a more general one, and to varying groups within each constituency. 3c MAKING ART HISTORY Historians, geographers and English studies specialists, as well as art historians, contributed to the accompanying symposia and study days; gallery talks and lectures were organized for adults, events and educational packs for teachers and schoolchildren. Films were shown and concerts arranged. In addition, lecturers at Nottingham and Yale made use of the exhibitions in their undergraduate teaching. These two exhibitions therefore provided scope for interaction between academic art history and the wider community.The need to make exhibitions both didactic and visually appealing, both accessible to the 'ordinary' visitor and informative to the specialist, as well as the usual adjustment of the ideal exhibition to what was possible in practical terms, necessitated compromise at every stage.This paper argues that such compromises are essential to the practice of art history, considered as an educational activity, and that distinctions between the interests of curators and those of university art historians have been over-emphasized in recent years. T HE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION of Chinese Art, held at the Royal Academy of Arts from the summer of 1935 to the spring of 1936, was a definitive event for the shaping of western narratives of Chinese art.This paper will address the tension between, on the one hand, the objectives of the survey exhibition (expressed in the organisers' desire To hold up to the public of the West a many-sided mirror reflecting from its every surface the brilliance of the creative artistic spirit of China'), and. on the other its role in the construction of the Sung dynasty as the 'golden age' of Chinese ceramics. Organised by a committee of collectors and museum professionals, the exhibition marked the culmination of several decades of collaboration between private individuals and public institutions, advancing a taste for pre-Ming ceramic art.The exhibition was the first major public exhibition in Britain to include early Chinese ceramics and also the first to provide a genuine survey of Chinese Art held in this country. At stake in the chronological narrative articulated through the exhibition's displays were western audiences' perceptions of the relative status of the art of different dynastic periods. T HIS PAPER WILL FOCUS ON the 1971 Arts Council exhibition 'Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design Since 1917', held at the Hayward Gallery. In the British historiography of Russian Constructivism, the exhibition is generally regarded as a turning point in how and why constructivist art was exhibited, and as signifying the formation of an identity for Constructivism that moved away from the dominant Gabo­ centred paradigm propagated in the West since the 1930s. According to Camilla Gray the exhibition was originally conceived in order to define a coherent movement that existed in the West largely as a 'much-cited name', that is, to re-establish the movement in a Russian context, emphasising its political imperatives and multiplicity of practice. There are a great many acknowledged, yet unexplored issues arising from the exhibition, for example the effect of Soviet intervention as regards loan policy, and the role of the Hayward as institution, in the context of other pioneering exhibitions held in commercial galleries.The exhibition's reputation as a defining and decisive moment in the history of Constructivism in this country is generally recognised.This paper will question this notion, exploring the relationship between the critical position the exhibition occupies within a post-197 I British historiographic tradition of Constructivism and the meanings acquired by the exhibition in its original context.This paper will ultimately suggest the ways in which the exhibition impacted on the formation of an identity of Russian Constructivism for a British audience. JUDITH GREEN (Independent scholar) A Many-Sided MirronThe International Exhibition of Chinese Art 1935-36 VICKI KIRKMAN (University of Liverpool) 'Art in Revolution' and British Identities of Constructivism 3_ STRAND XII INGENIOUS TRANSFORMATIONS AND VISIONARY TECHNOLOGIES Sanda Miller (Southampton Institute) Ingenious transformations and visionary technologies have transformed the physical and psychological world from at least the renaissance to the present day. From Leonardo's experiments with hydraulic engineering, comparative anatomy and musical instruments, through Isaac Newton's work in optics and colour to current research interests in perception, visualisation, computer simulation, information transfer and digitial imaging, established categories of understanding have been, and are being, continually re-imagined and revised. AND VISIONARY TECHNOLOGIES S CIENTISTS HAVE ALWAYS expressed a strong urge to think in visual images, especially today with our new and exciting possibilities for the visual display of information. We can 'see' elementary particles in bubble chamber photographs. But what is the 'deep structure' of these images. Artists face similar problems. An excellent example is Pablo Picasso's painting 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.This work is considered to be a turning point in 20th century art because from it emerged what became known as 'Cubism', the origin of all subsequent art movements. In their own way, both bubble chamber photographs and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon contain data offered by nature. What is behind these data - that is, what is their "deep structure" - or meaning not revealed to our sense, but is there nevertheless? I will address this part of the wide-ranging problem of knowledge representation with a case study of how artists and scientists discovered a new type of visual imagery, one that represents reality beyond sense perception. I N THIS PAPER I WOULD LIKE TO EXPLORE my interest in light, which is part of an inner need to emphasize the spiritual or immaterial side of life. One night when I was eighteen and spending the summer in Geneva, I was at the airport waiting for my father to arrive. I stood in front of the large glass panels that formed the walls overlooking the airfield and I saw myself reflected in the glass, my image pierced by the guiding lights spread across the field, the airplane lights on the move and the lights from the houses sprinkled across the foothills. I felt at that moment an intense experience of my own transparency and the ambiguity of solid matter which has influenced all of my own work since that time. In this paper I concentrate on three areas of my work in which I have used light to explore the relationships between the material and the immaterial. In the first, I used the disc, circle and sphere, each of which relates to the shape of the sun, the moon and the human eye.The second area of work centers around the forms of cylinders and cones: the shapes behind our retinas that convert light into electrical impulses.The third area of my work began with a vision I had of a transparent crystal world of light, using the many faceted forms of the prism. I propose to follow my progression from this cool world of outer space to a much more turbulent world of inner space. A MONG THE ILLUSTRATIONS in Jurgis Baltrusaitis's Anamorphoses, a book on curious perspectives and magic transformations, first published in 1955, there is a very strange double image. Horizontally it is a landscape, but when turned vertically it shows a bearded man in profile. For Baltrusaitis the image depicted the anamorphic garden of Cardinal Montalti in Rome. A number of scholars have retained the view: the gardens of the Villa Montalti. laid out by Cardinal Montalti. later SixtusV, by the end of the 16th century, had the form of a giant head shaped of rocks, turf, trees and bushes, as well as architectural structures. Was such an anthropomorphic and. apparently anamorphic garden possible at all in Rome at the time when formal designs predominated? The ingenious garden designs of Solomon de Cause (1576-1635) included anthropomorphic mounts made to conceal internal grottos with mechanical and steam operated fountains. Some of these designs were inspired by Cause's visit to Italy. A number of real gardens modelled on ARTHUR MILLER (University Collge London) Visualising the Invisible: Imagery in 20th Century Art and Science LILIAN LIJN (Artist) Body and Soul: Interactions between the Material and the Immaterial in Sculpture ANNA BENTKOWSKA (Southampton Institute) Campus Anthropomorphus or Anamorphosis? The Mystery of Cardinal Montaki's Garden 59 COLIN TUDGE (Independent Scholar) rt, Science and Religion SANDA MILLER (Southampton Institute) Cybernetic Pas-de-Deux at Le Corbusier's UnitE d'Habitation in Marseilles INGENIOUS TRANSFORMATIONS the human form have been known in the North of Europe, but in none of them anthropomorphism manifested itself as overtly as in the head-landscape in question.The existing documentary and iconographic evidence for Villa Montalti also speaks against Baltrusaitis' view. The print used by Baltrusaitis comes from Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Rome 1646) a scientific consideration of light and shadow by Athanasius Kircher SJ (1602-80). Like many other aspects of his wide ranging scholarship, Kircher's print, Campus anthropomorphus, was not his original contribution.The paper traces back numberous earlier versions of the composition, including the one which is believed to have caused the confusion. Using contemporary iconographic, scientific and documentary evidence, and by analysing some of its material through the manipulation of digital images and computer simulation, the paper attempts to reveal the secret of the mistaken identification of the campus anthropomorphus as the anamorphosis of Montalti's garden. T HE 'ARTS-SCIENCE DIVIDE' seems as wide in Britain as in C.R Snow's day - not helped by some commentators in both camps who insist on their irreconcilable differences. Science and religion have often been at loggerheads and still do great damage to each other - again not helped by zealots in each camp. Of course these three modes of thought are different. Science, after all, is rooted in the (metaphysical) notion that there is a real Universe out there with real creatures in it, which can be understood; artists need not be their concern; and religions, traditionally (though they do not need to) have been happy to move in and out of what scientists would accept as 'reality' and make much of what scientists call 'supernatural'. But it does seem worthwhile to work on reconciliation. I want simply to suggest that the creative process in artists and scientists is effectively the same, and that the two differ primarily in what they do with the results: artists seeking to polish the ideas and scientists teasing out those specific elements that are testable. Religion need not be linked ineluctably with the supernatural. Its prime tasks are to provide a complete account of the Universe - one that should embrace science - and deliberately to refine emotional responses.The latter endeavour is unique to religion - and seems very necessary. All in all I suggest that the common ground that can be discovered between the three pursuits should prove fruitful. F OR FIFTEEN DAYS IN 1956, the citizens of Marseilles were privileged to witness the 'premier festival' of art of the avant-garde.The event took place at Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation regarded by the maverick critic Michel Ragon 'as the only contemporary architectural work comparable with the most ambitious building of the past: the medieval cathedral and renaissance chateau', worthy of hosting so momentous an event. Against a background of valiant attempts by the organisers, artists and critics alike to define, yet again the concept of the avant-garde, the unsuspecting citizens of Marseilles were regaled with an all embracing Gesamtkunstwerk which included theatre, music, dance, poetry and the visual arts. Among the rich pickings on offer was a collaboration between Maurice Bejart and the Hungarian born sculptor Nicolas Schoffer. His sculpture CYSP I (cybernetic-spatiodynamic construction) was first introduced to the public in 1956 on the stage of the Sarah Bernhardt theatre in Paris and during the same year, made to 'dance' by Bejart in a ballet entitled Etudes Rythmiques presented on the concrete corridors of Le Corbusier's masterpiece in Marseilles. It was - as Ragon commented - a 60 AND VISIONARY TECHNOLOGIES unique demonstration whereby Tart abstrait et la mecanique s'unissent a la cibernetique'. An analysis and critical discussion of this 'union' seen from a contemporary viewpoint will constitute the subject of my paper. I OBSERVED A PAINTER, Humphrey Ocean, with two modern biomedical tools in order to find out more about the process of seeing. So with Oxford University's Sensorimotor Control laboratory, we fitted an eye-tracker on Humphrey while he was drawing a portrait.The eye-tracker informed us precisely where the artist's eyes were focusing at every instant when he was looking at the model and then drawing on the paper We combined a movement sensor to record what his hand was doing, and filmed in close-up the details of the emerging drawing.Then with Standford University's Neuropsychology laboratory, we placed Humphrey in an fMRI brain scanner to see which parts of his brain were active when he was drawing portraits from photographs.This exploratory study, which has already produced some fascinating results, was done with the help of a Wellcome Trust Sci-Art grant, and will form the subject of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London in April/June, 1999. This I believe, is the first time that factual data about the picture production process has been recorded. For the Art Historians Conference, I propose to introduce a 26-minute documentary film, which shows the various stages of this study. IUST OVER TWO YEARS AGO an intriguing notion emerged from an J eclectic range of artists interested in science, scientists sympathetic to The arts and other professionals interested in both art and science. What the group shared was a commitment to finding a practical scheme that brought together the often separated cultural spheres of science and art. What would happen, they wondered, if the Wellcome Trust encouraged and enabled artists and scientists to work together on projects that grew out of genuinely reciprocal processes of inspiration? The initiative built on the foundations of this simple idea was a competitive funding scheme launched under the title of SCI-ART The SCI-ART initiative was intended to supplement the Wellcome Trust's existing support for the historical and cultural contexts of medicine, seeking first to interest people in the biomedical sciences who might not otherwise be drawn to them, and second to enrich both the worlds of art and science with the seeds of cross-fertilisation. The SCI-ART initiative was launched and has continued to be run in the spirit of an experiment - with those most closely involved with its initiation having little idea of what outcomes it would bring. Now in its second year, having clocked up over 400 applications and 11 grant winners, we believe that the experiment has been successful and have been unreservedly impressed by the creative energy that partnerships have brought to their projects. The winning projects this year were: The Painter's Eye Movements, a study and exhibition concerning how a painter uses his eyes: Ritual Tendencies, a wry film based on home-movie clips that presents a window into the genetically inherited features and behaviours of family-life; B/ot/co, a project to create computer forms that explore how life controls itself: Chemical Portraits, an attempt to capture and analyse scent in order to convey the mood of an individual; Inside Out a project that presents medical objects woven into attractive fabrics in order to explore patients making processes; and The Dance of Death, a collaboration to generate a fresh body of artwork that looks at the age-old idea of the dead having a rich existence after death... JOHNTSCHALENKO (Independent Film Maker) 7 Paint What I Can See and At Any Given Moment, I Willi Start from What I can See, from That Place at That Moment' (Humphrey Ocean) DENNA JONES (The Wellcome Trust) SCI-ART:The Wellcome Trust's Funding Initiative to Encourage Collaborations between Artists and Scientists 6 INGENIOUS TRANSFORMATIONS A MIDST THE DYNAMIC cultural community in Barcelona at the end of World War I, Rafael Barradas stunned the artistic establishment in Spain with a new art form he called Vibracionismo. Besides reflecting the commotion of modern urban life prominent in Barradas's Futurist-inspired art, Vibracionismo also recalls the growing popular interest in modem science and its advances in the areas of wireless telegraphy and X-rays, as evidenced in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. The wide popularization of the discovery of Hertzian waves at the end of the nineteenth century made 'vibrations' a general, layperson's term for a wide range of recently discovered electromagnetic waves. Furthermore, Vibrationism implies a connection with correlative interests in telepathy, contemporary spiritualism and other forms of hyper-conscious communication prominent in the Simultaneist days of the Delaunays. Barradas situated his new aesthetic territory in the higher invisible realm of vibrations, or as his friend JoachinTorres-Garcia described in 1936 'a/go sobrereal o mas real' ie. something beyond the real. It is this effort to go beyond reality, beyond visible nature that not only links Barradas to his contemporaries in the broader European avant-garde of the war and post-war years, but also establishes Vibracionismo as an important source in the development of the Spanish vanguard. I N THE 1960s a visionary technology which created great public interest and concern as the decade progressed was the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD to explore altered states of consciousness and perception. By 1965, increasing public familiarity with the effects of such drugs created what Bridget Riley, whose Op Art works were by then internationally famous, later called 'a collision between my intentions as an artist and the cultural context in which I found myself. I remember being told, as though it were some sort of compliment, that it was the greatest kick to go down and smoke in front of my painting Fall'. My paper will explore the collision between Op Art and drug culture. What was the cultural context in which ways of confronting the nature of perception as diverse as an Op painting and a drugs trip should have been seen as being as closely related as Riley's interlocutor implied? How did Op relate to other debates on perception in this period? Also, did Op itself amount to no more than an ingenious transformation of the quasi-scientific optical illusion diagrams reproduced in encyclopaedias and textbooks, and if not, how did it transcend such material for the artists, critics and curators in Op Art and its promotion? IN 1685, MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN (1647-1717) moved from Frankfurt to I the Dutch Republic. A painter of plants and insects (her painstaking depictions, made in distant Surinam, were published in Amsterdam in 1705 under the title Metamorphosis /nsectorum Surinamensium, she thus found herself in culture for which the question of perception - of seeing or into seeing: of accessing the very small and the very distant - had become vitally important from a scientific as well as aesthetic, intellectual and indeed commercial standpoint. She found herself, in other words, in a culture that had been undergoing transformations due to the active and innovative engagement of its scientists and artists in the field of optics and with the development of optical technologies. Whereas previously such technologies had been generally regarded by natural philosophers as devices that deceive by distorting reality, they were now being used to open up the previously unknown and unexplored but apparently infinitely expansive regions of the micro- and macrocosmic.The 6: AND VISIONARY TECHNOLOGIES dramatic and destabilising effects of researches in these fields, particularly for astronomy and navigation, are well documented. It is against this background (of technological transformation and trans-oceanic trade, and the philosophical, cultural and socio-political practices both derived from, informing, and coexisting alongside them) that the visual records of Merian's journeyings over the immense and into the minute are explored. •=3 STRAND XIII ARSTEXTRINA: PRESERVING THE IMAGE AND ENHANCING THE VALUE OF TEXTILES Mary Brooks and Maria Hayward (Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton) When a textile passes from the context for which it was produced, whether sacred or profane, professional or amateur to a museum or private collection, it becomes a historical artefact to be stored, studied or displayed. This strand will explore how contemporary textile professionals such as curators and conservators interpret textiles and whether these interpretations bear the mark of the interests of the professionals concerned. Papers considering the social, anthropological, historical, artistic, financial, spiritual and evidential value of textiles for the curator conservator or art historian will be presented. The convenors of this strand gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board. (A T HIS PAPER WILL EXPLORE various ways of looking at textiles represented in paintings of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in order to demonstrate the interest of this type of interdisciplinary study for both textile and art historians, with special reference to the collection of the National Gallery in London. The first part of the paper will consider two main themes: the involvement of artists in designing textiles and the depiction of textiles in a few, selected paintings. For these works it is hoped to present material to reveal whether painters tended to copy existing textiles or invented designs to suit the need of the composition. In order to round out this discussion, comparisons will be made with sculptural representations as well as surviving textiles from a range of collections. The focus of the paper will then shift to explore the way in which a contextual study of forms of worship - arising from a study of textiles ­can contribute to our understanding of how small, portable altarpieces were used during the later Middle Ages.This refers specifically to the Wilton Diptych, a key part of the National Gallery's collection,The Wilton Diptych represents many fascinating aspects of Richard ll's kingship, one facet of which will be discussed here. T EXTILES ARE AN IMMENSELY VERSATILE MEDIUM, acting as bold statements of an individual's aspirations or conveying subtle nuances about social standing, political allegiance and disposable income. Whether used as personal adornment or domestic embellishment, textiles provide a valuable insight into human society.This paper will discuss aspects of the semiotics of symbolic display in two contrasting fifteenth century Italian states, Florence and Ferrara, and examine the range of available evidence for the visual significance of dress and textiles in contemporary life.The author will also explore the economics of textile and dress production in relationship to everyday expenses and with reference to use by differing social hierarchies. THE PAPER WILL TRACK THE DEVELOPMENT of several public and private collections of linen damsk and diaper napery and consider a number of interlinked questions relating to collecting policy, method of acquisition, and the relationship between collecting and scholarship. The purposes for forming collections and resulting acquisition policies have been, and remain, diverse.These have variously included: to provide stimulation and historical examplars for contemporary manufacturers; to reflect a state's history through bespoke and personalised patterns woven for its citizens and apposite commemorative stock patterns: to form a comprehensive collection of the output of a particular weaving centre or alternatively a cross-section from all production areas; to collect individual pieces to satisfy the need of particular research interests. The methods of acquisition, whether through purchase or donation, has a direct impact upon the implementation of collecting policy. Further the seriousness with which the details of provenance have been pursued affects aspects of the collection's usefulness to scholars. LISA MONNAS (Independent scholar) Textiles and Paintings (14th-16th century):The Benefit of Hindsight? JANE BRIDGEMAN (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) 'Riccamente vestiti e nobelmente adornati'.Textiles for Dress and Furnishing - The Social Role of Textiles in Fifteenth Century Italy. DAVID MITCHELL (The Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London) The Development of Linen Damask Collections 65 PRESERVING THE IMAGE RUTH BARNES (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) Indian Trade Textiles: Sources and Transmission of Design CHRISTINEWISE (Fawcett Development Library, London Guildhall University) Suffrage Banners at the Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University DINAH EASTOP (Textile Conservation Centre, Southampton University) The Social Life of Representations, The Value of Haddon's String Figures REGULA SCHORTA (Abegg-Stiftung. Berne) Learning about Medieval Textiles: Co­operation between Conservator and Art Historian THE PAPER WILL PRESENT Indian block-printed textiles that have been traded widely to societies around the Indian Ocean littoral.The design and specific motifs of these fabrics will be introduced, and the link to other Indian artistic forms will be developed. Of particular importance are comparisons to architectural ornaments, to manuscript paintings, and to Islamic grave stones, all associated with north-western India. While iconographic and stylistic comparisons have been made in the past, the recent research results on trade textiles provides new, and considerably more reliable, evidence for the connection.The paper will then give evidence for the importance of the textile trade for the transmission of certain Indian designs to other parts of the Indian Ocean. A BANNER IS NOT A LITERARY AFFAIR, it is not a placard; leave such to boards and sandwichmen. A banner is a thing to float in the wind, to fly in the breeze, to flirt its colours for your pleasure, to half show and half-conceal, a device you long to unravel; you do not want to read it, you want to worship it'. (On banners and banner making'. The Englishwoman,VII, August-October 1919). So wrote Mary Lowndes, the designer and member of the Artists' Suffrage League.The Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University, holds 5 I suffrage banners, from the early twentieth century.They are both unique and striking visual images and a living record of the struggle for women's suffrage.This paper will examine the tactics used by women's suffrage societies to achieve their goals and how suffrage banners were used to promote women's suffrage and social equality in Britain during the early twentieth century. It will look in detail at the preservation and conservation, storage and display challenges the Library now faces in its custodianship of these wonderful textiles, with illustrations from the collection. H ADDON'S STRING FIGURES are part of the British Museum's ethnography collections.They are eight loops of string sewn onto card (BM. 89+207-21 3 and 89+215).They were probably constructed in I 888 during AC . Haddon's first visit to the Torres Strait.This Zoological expedition inspired Haddon to organise the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, now understood as a founding moment in the history of social anthropology in Britain. This paper describes the process whereby the string figures (cat's cradles), made by Torres Strait Islanders as part of their social life, have been turned into objects, part of Britain's imperial heritage. Haddon's string figures exist as artefacts (string on card), as figures (published text and drawings) and as action (performance, ritual and enactment). This paper demonstrates how these string figures can be seen as representations, which gain their value through their own social life and the social life of what they represent.The hypothesis that objects gain their value via the complexities of the social life of what they may represent may resonate within art history as well as within museum ethnography. COCUSE D AROUN D A SELECTION of well illustrated case studies labou t significant medieval textiles, both secular and ecclesiastic, this paper will explore the important role textile conservation plays in the growing body of knowledge about surviving medieval textiles. All knowledge, whether derived from a detailed examination of a particular artifact or by in-depth archival research, brings us to a better understanding of objects which can often appear to be far removed from modern society, either by their age or their poor condition. Art historians 66 ENHANCING THE VALUE O F TEXTILES can provide invaluable information on the cost and appearance of fabrics, their origins, the use and significance of iconography and changes in fashion, whether the owner of the textiles was a person of rank, such as a bishop or leading noble, detailed documentary evidence about their clothes and textiles for home and chapel. A conservator can compliment this with analysis of the weaves and fibres, evidence of the cut and reuse of fabrics, an assessment of the construction and condition.This information can be supplemented by a range of analytical methods, including identification of dyes and metal threads. Collaboration between experts with complimentary expertise can reveal fascinating details. 67 STRAND XIV ART AND FASHION: MAPPING THE BOUNDARIES Robert Radford (University of Southampton) In the light of current interest in the proximities, confluences and analogies - as well as the discrepancies and ruptures - observable within the fields of art and of fashion, this strand will explore further the potentialities of this topic. The concept 'fashion' is to be taken both in its inclusive sense, as the cultural desire for the new, but in the more specific sense of dress and personal appearance. Contributions will offer approaches from within a wide scope of disciplines and theoretical positions and which might include the history of taste, consumption, representation or gender theory, material culture or social or institutional history, or the question of periodisation and style. T HE CONTENTION THAT RECENT ART practice has progressively taken on distinct characteristics of the fashion mode has been widely affirmed and largely taken as both axiomatic and inescapable. It has become a commonplace of popular and academic criticism. An indicative series of international exhibitions, dedicated to exploring the interpenetration of art and fashion, has served to add further weight to this proposition. Yet it would appear that this apparently genial acceptance is based on a notably insubstantial theoretical support.This paper will aim to examine some of the potential methodologies which might be of use in devising more convincing and secure explicatory models of the relationship. In particular the modernist, sociological perspectives of Simmel, might be taken as a starting point to examine the claim that the all-consuming merging of social experience, including the production and consumption of art, is directly related to the social and economic dynamics of individualism.This might then be reviewed in the light of the postmodernist commentary on The Empire of the Ephemeral by Lipovetsky. The factor that must now be added to these positions is the pervasive mode of irony, which demands, above all, the playful participation of an increasingly sophisticated public. Can it be shown then that the most successful current interplay between art and fashion relies on a shared sense of disputed territories and the excitement of border raids, which, ultimately, have the paradoxical effect of asserting differences? I WOULD LIKE TO REVISIT AND AMPLIFY some ideas I could only touch upon in Fashion and Communication concerning what I called in that text a 'sort of generalised undecidability' of fashion and clothing. Fashion and clothing exist between so many dichotomous pairs of concepts (public/private, animate/inanimate, individual identity/mass production, modesty/seduction, display/concealment and so on), that they seem pre-eminent examples of Derrida's version of deconstruction. I would like to develop the account of these undecidables by exploring the relation between the ambivalent status of fashion in society and the anthropological and cultural anxieties that result from the experience of the anomalous, as explained by Mary Douglas, for example, in her Purity and Danger. M ANET'S COMMENT, MADE IN 1881, neatly juxtaposes the enduring convention of the nude and the modernity of the corset, but the most significant word is, perhaps, 'perhaps'. If one juxtaposes, say Cabanel's Birth of Venus with Monet's Camille. the contemporaneity of the green-striped dress and fur-trimmed jacket of the latter forces the pseudo-classical nudity ofVenus into the category of outmoded convention. But there is no linear progression, even for the avant-garde, from the depiction of nudity to the representation of modem clothing.The aim of this paper is to show something of the range of the debate. Baudelaire's heroic and/or mournful men in black have long focused attention on the possibilities on modern dress in artistic representation. For Baudelaire, modem man, and more particularly modem woman, rose above the banal naturalism of the phenomenal world by virtue of the imaginative design of their clothes. But there was not unequivocal acceptance of this analysis. Baudelaire expounded his 'theory of fashion' most fully in Le peintre de la vie moderne, only published in 1863. although written in 1860. He was preceded in this discourse byTheophile Gautier who produced his article 'De la mode' in 1858. Gautier celebrated modem dress as natural, finding the nude as preposterous as the duck­billed platypus. While Baudelaire struggled to place his article anywhere, finally finding a home for it in Le Figaro, Gautier addressed the two distinct ROBERT RADFORD (University of Southampton) Boundaries and Border Raids: Configuring the Shared and Disputed Territories of Art and Fashion MALCOLM BARNARD (University of Derby) The Anxiety of Ambivalence ED LILLEY (University of Bristol) The satin corset is perhaps the nude of our time':Thinking about (Un)dressing the Body in Nineteenth Century France. 69 LESLIE TOPP (Oxford University) Men's Clothing, the Warenhaus and the Goldman & Salatsch Building by Adolph Loos ALICIA FOSTER (Independent scholar) Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman SUSAN ATHANASSIOU (Falmouth College of Art)_ .. . ..... . ... , Fashioning Artistic Identity: Matisse s _ _, . ' . Femme au Chapeau. 1905 ART AND FASHION readerships of L'artiste and the journal des Domes. Boundaries (and therefore alternatives) seem everyhere at issue. The debate might be characterised by two subtly different criticisms of Monet's Camille at the I 866 Salon. Edmond About complained 'What does the dress matter to me if I can't imagine a well-modelled body inside it, while Emile Zola insisted simply, 'Look at the dress1. I N 1909 AN D 1912, Adolf Loos built the premises for the men's tailoring firm Goldman & Salatsch in the centre ofVienna.The building, usually referred to as the Looshaus, holds an enigmatic position in the history of modern architecture, having been embraced by modernists for its stark honesty and by post-modernists for its playfully deceptive qualities. I explore the ambiguity of Loos's design in this paper with reference to the ideas about men's clothing circulating in early 20th~century Vienna and to the politics of the clothing industry there. First, I will review Loos's well-known analogy between modem architecture and men's clothing. Loos believed that the best model for the modern urban building was the well-made tail coat: it was simple, unornamented and made of good material, but far from exposing what was behind it to view, it served as a mask. I situate Loos's analogy in the wider Viennese discussion of the 'English style' (in clothing) and use it as a framework for an analysis of the 'honest masking' quality of the Goldman & Salatsch building. My second theme is the status of the Goldman & Salatsch building in the context of the proliferation of retail emporia (Warenhauser) for ready-made clothing in Vienna at the turn of the century. Loos took pains to point out that his building was not a Warenhaus but the headquarters of a prestigious and established tailoring firm. Using comparative examples, I show that the building's simplicity and modernity on the one hand and its opaqueness on the other served to distinguish it from the typical Warenhaus, which was simultaneously an eclectic invocation of historical styles and a transparent vehicle for the display of clothing.This distinction was particularly important. I argue, in the context of a contemporary anti-Semitic political campaign against Warenh%ouser. T HIS PAPER WILL ADDRESS the role of dress in the construction of identity in two self-portraits made by Gwen John early in her career, the painting now known as Self-Portrait (National Portrait Gallery), and that titled Self-Portrait in a Red Blouse (Tate Gallery, London). Although the artist used dissonant strategies of representation, and the costume and composition represented in each painting could be interpreted as creating two very different images of the self, I will argue that both portraits are in fact linked in that they are rooted in the new models of femininity which were in circulation during the late 1890s and early 1900s.The artist's use of dress to masquerade in the guise of artistic authority, and to refer to a tradition of representing artistic women, will be discussed, and the relationship of the costumes that could denote a modern creative femininity with mainstream fashion will be considered. Uncovering these strategies of self-representation will reveal the significance of the politics of appearance for a woman artist of this period. THI S PAPER SEEKS TO EXAMINE through the methodology of a I polylogue, the interconnection of ideas between the words Fashion. Art and Identity. Within the art-historical context of Matisse's oeuvre rt is . suggested that he consciously sought to construct an artistic identity by 70 MAPPING THE BOUNDARIES harnessing/exploiting the ideological concepts of the 'femininity' of his present, 1905, embodied in the wearer of the hat, identified as his wife ­the Femme au Chapeau. Using the inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach in the social anthropology of Barnes & Eicher (eds.), (1992) which relates dress to gender as an extension of the body, it is possible to explore the social identity inscribed in dress that is simultaneously perceived and understood. Defining this dress analysis as a fundamental understanding of 'fashion' as dress, the relation of fashion to art is viewed through Baudrillard who cites '...the fashioning of the body as a characteristic feature of modernity' It is argued that the 'social identity' reinscribed in a work of art seemingly confirms and perpetuates a degree of continued control by those who maintain power at any given point in time, but in reality 'fashion', as a reflection of the 'politics of taste', can be seen to be the motivator of change. IN 1989,WIM WENDERS was commissioned by the Pompidou Centre to make a film 'in the context of fashion'. Although he says, at the opening of A Notebook on Cities and Clothes, that the industries of fashion and film may have broad similarities, Wenders chose to start with something which felt especially close to him: a jacket bearing the signature of Japanese designerYohji Yamamoto. Throughout, Wenders finds similarities between his own practice and that ofYamamoto and between their respective responses to Hollywood and Pans. Both declare themselves at odds with the 'neomania' by which their industries are generally characterised and promoted. Indeed,Yamamoto is presented as a familiar Wenders protagonist - the nomadic outsider, searching for meaning in the process of his craft and in everyday existence. Extrapolating from Baudelaire and Benjamin, Wenders seems to suggest that the prototype fabricated in the studio stands in the relation of a negative to a photograph, and conducts an apologia for the status of Yohji's fashion as high art with the same degree of fervour with which early enthusiasts defended the Art of Photography. But Wenders barely acknowledges the political and social content of Benjamin's argument, maintaining, apparently, a somewhat elitist and strangely conservative position. The purpose of my paper will be to explore the grounds and the plausibility of the analogy which Wenders draws between film and fashion and to examine the particular means he employs. I N THE FACE OF GROWING GLOBALISATION of the marketplace and deregulation, Australian fashion design of the 1970s abandoned a longstanding reliance on inspiration from Europe, to re-examine its domestic and especially indigenous 'grassroots'.These indigenous sources of ideas were believed to stand outside the notion of western style itself. This paper examines a highly productive decade in which fashion design and Aboriginal paintings (dot painting) were in some senses unevenly 'braided' together, offering the notion of 'threading' as a new way of thinking about cross-cultural stylistic engagements. Fashion designers like Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee turned atavistically to the products of traditional indigenous painters and textile designers for inspiration, whilst at the same time Aboriginal painters in remote centres like PapunjaTula and Utopia were being encouraged to use European AMY SARGEANT (University of Plymouth) Yamamoto and Wenders: A Notebook on Cities and Clothes MARGARET MAYNARD (University of Queensland) 'Grassroots Style': Aboriginal Art and European Fashion Design of the I970s-80s materials and enter the European marketplace. Both black and white design cultures embraced new ideas and concepts within a vibrant political climate of national renewal and encouragement, and what emerged by the 80s were highly successful commercial ventures on both counts. Yet this 'braiding' of styles has ironically impoverished European fashion design and paradoxically allowed Aboriginal painting to grow and develop, to the extent that today they represent some of Australia's most original art forms. PAUL JOBLING (Kingston University) Fashion Figures: Intertextual Masculine Identities in Fashion Photography During the 1990s. I N SYSTEME DE LA MODE (1967), Roland Barthes evinces the idea of the magazine as a 'machine for making fashion' by focusing on what he calls le vetement ecrit (written clothing) and le vetement-image (image­clothing). But he affords priority to the first of these two terms, maintaining that words seem to profer a purer reading of the fashion text than pictures. In this paper I want to contest Barthes' logocentrism by arguing that most fashion spreads seem rather to elaborate a dialectic or complementarity between words and images. Indeed, fashion spreads operate not only on the level of intratextuality, in so far as captions, descriptions and photographs are laid out in them as a composite entity, but also frequently on the level of poetic intertextuality, in so far as they refer, for example, to literature and film. I shall concentrate my analysis of these issues on 'Close Encounters', which appeared in Arena Homme Plus (Spring/Summer 1995), and its ostensible relationship to Genet's picaresque novel Querelle de Brest (1953). Accordingly, I shall also be dealing with the performative sexual and racial ambiguities of both texts and the way that they seem to deal with masculine identity as a mutable and transgressive phenomenon. RANDAL RHODES (University of Frostburg, Maryland) Fashioning, Wrapping and Shrouding the Dandiacal Body T HE DANDY CASTS ASIDE CONVENTION to run not along the curlicue line of fashion. With a cynical air he epitomises all the mockery and brilliant despair of his epoch. Investing wholly in a 'discourse hung on a clothes-peg,' the dandy weaves himself into a living visible garment, which serves, as his chic rebellion against middle-class hegemony. Pride is taken in the possibilities of paradox, while his visual tissue is threaded with fantasies of homosocial clublands and illusions of happiness, in infected and cancerous. In spite of this, he appropriates these bodily surfaces for an artistic fashioning, wrapping himself in the swaggering luxe of a disengaged sensibility, a mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive. 'To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and go shopping for a new Versace outfit?' Thusly facing the void, armed with gay irony (and ironing) as a positive destructive force, the dandy fashions a fine conceit. Bruce Weber's photography for the Gianni Versace menswear catalogues narcissistically reflects the persona of the modern dandy.The models, languid, sybaritic, sprawled and unbuttoned, pose with sculpture's snobbery, glorying in their superior material endowments.Yet, even though these models revel in masculine negligence and doggedly battle with the Devil, their morbidezza and Brummelliana bespeak of a gilded not golden existence. This paper will define post-modern constructs of the dandy as fashioned by Weber for Versace, the designer's wrappage of the body with a bacchanalia of styles, the fetish of clothing, its consumption, and the contextualisation ofVersace's murder ~2 STRAND XV POLICIES AND POLITICS IN THE VISUAL ARTS Stephen Foster and Oliver Sumner (University of Southampton) The impact of the British state upon the production and understanding of the visual arts since 1945 has been relatively little examined. Themes addressed will include state enterprise and opportunism, centralism and regionalism, prescription and support, as they arise from party political policy for the arts, funding criteria and mechanisms, the activities of the Regional Arts Boards and the recent impact of the National Lottery. The particular relationship between state guidance and control, and the production of contemporary art in the I 990s, will form a focus of inquiry. POLICIES AND POLITICS CHIN-TAOWU (University of East Anglia) Guardians of Enterprise Culture: Art Trustees in the 1980s T HE 1980s WITNESSED a fundamental political transformation in Britain. After Margaret Thatcher came to office in 1979, she and her allies set about robustly advocating the doctrine of free enterprise, and continued to do so throughout her successive terms of office. Individualism being one of the cornerstones of the enterprise culture of the Thatcher decade, it should come as no surprise to find a particular group of individuals transferring to the art world the same sort of entrepreneurial initiatives that they so successfully used in business.These men of free enterprise, by virtue of their standing in the corporate world, were in a privileged position to transform their economic capital into cultural capital, and vice versa. The paper will examine how a collection of high profile businessmen came to making the running of British art institutions their business within the new privatising culture of '80s and '90s Britain. Concentrating on the trustees at the Tate Gallery, it will look at the changed role of the British art trustees and the demographic composition of the Tate trustees. It will also analyse the underlying problems which may arise once the needs and the logic of private capital enter and permeate a public institution. ANNA HARDING (Goldsmiths College, London) JumpingThrough Hoops:Funding Criteria.Value Judgements and 'New Circus' I TAKE THE TERM 'NEW CIRCUS' to represent new initiatives dreamt up by funding bodies in attempts to distribute their money more equitably during the 90s, set against a continuing British establishment undercurrent where issues of quality, excellence and cultural value remain terms to be manipulated by various vested interest groups as convenient. I will chart the role and impact of Arts Council funding in relation to three areas of artistic practice in the 1990s.The methodology will inevitably be framed by my personal experience gained over a number of years through sitting on funding panels, working as a grants officer a gallery curator and also a board member of an arts organisation. The three areas I will take as case studies are: Lottery-funded gallery architecture; New Collaborations; and The New British Art (The Turner Prize', 'Sensation', 'Die Young Stay Pretty'). I plan to illustrate how in each of these three areas the dictates of funding, ie new funding schemes, funding language and eligibility for funds, have shaped or influenced practice/mind set/language surrounding practice. The paper will draw from articles, official documents (funding scheme guidelines, annual reports, newsletters etc), conference papers, lectures and interviews with key individuals involved either as funding body staff, committee members or as practicioners in each field. The research will be underpinned by a theoretical framework informed by Bourdieu/Hans Haacke, Adorno and Horkheimer and Foucault, as well as more recent developments around their work including Horkheimer, Bennett. McGuigan et al. and the recent discussions around cultural value informing work in the field of cultural studies. This paper develops on my work as Programme Director of the MA in Fine Art Administration and Curatorship at Goldsmiths College, where we interrogate curatorial decision-making processes, and the political and social context in which decisions of taste and value are made, and also my own PhD research. IN THE VISUAL ARTS T HE NEW CHAIRMAN OF THE ARTS COUNCIL, Gerry Robinson has promised under the slogan 'Art for Everyone' a 'new era for the arts'. 'Art for Everyone' turns art into an instrument of social inclusion. This policy, I will argue, both misunderstands the uses of visual culture and Modern Art and seems unaware that the policy has nasty precedents.This paper will critically look at some of the origins and assumptions of the policy. T HIS PAPER WILL LOOK at the various ways in which the Government has seen, valued and used British art in the GovernmentArt Collection, in order to promote various images of Britain throughout the century.The paper will examine the extent to which the art displayedin Government buildings reflects the change (or lack of change) in the way Britain has seen itself, and the impact of the present Government's aim to create and give recognition to a new, more up-to-date image of Britain both at home and abroad. Works of art from the Government Art Collection are displayed in major British Government buildings in the United Kingdom and in British diplomatic posts throughout the world. 300 of these buildings are abroad and about 160 are in the UK (including 10 and I I Downing Street). Each year many thousands of people see works from the Collection in these locations.The Government Art Collection also lends works of art from its holdings to national and international temporary exhibitions. The objectives of the Government Art Collection are to help promote the image of Britain and reflect its culture, history and creativity in the visual arts.The collection is predominantly British, ranging from I 6th century portraits on wooden panels to contemporary video art. Now 100 years old, the Collection was first the responsibility of the Office of Works and is currently part of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. T E SECRET ART OF GOVERNMENT looks at the hidden world of art inside the walls of government, and interviews ministers including I in' John Major and Margaret Thatcher Delegates are invited to discuss with Professor W.J.T. Mitchell a range of ideas arising from his key-note lecture and from his published work. ANDREW BRIGHTON (Tate Gallery London) Stole Kitsch: the Social, Political and Aesthetic Origins, Assumptions and Consequences of 'Art for Everyone'. MARY BEAL (Government Art Collection) Th e chanS'm g Art of Government FILM SESSION The Secret Art of Government produced and directed by Nicholas Rossiter narrated by Jancis Robinson, 60 mins, BBC2. I 3 June 1998. SPECIAL EVENT: Discussion WIT H W.J.T. MITCHELL ^5 Association of Art Historians Cowcross Court 77 Cowcross Street London EC IM 6BP Design: John Gillett Print Offset Colour Print, Southampton