Conference Programme 28th Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians 5-7 April 2002, University of Liverpool COLONY 28th Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians 5-7 April 2002, Liverpool ftssoGwnM or AKT HMOHB Association of Art Historians 28th Annus 5-7 April 2002, University of Liverpool This conference marks an important departure fron conferences in several respects. Organized by three each responsible for a thematic strand in the conf multiple sessions, this event focuses discussion o: capacious, and highly contested concepts - Cultui Our intention has been to encourage contributors assess their art-historical knowledge and to consi interests and perspectives have been formed, mig] and perhaps changed. This year's AAH conference also specifically welcomes backgrounds and concerns lie in art practice and conte criticism and theory. Culture: Capital: Colony encour attending to interrogate the status of historical and co art writing within a global context, and specifically to European and US socio-economic and cultural develop, and art of other continents. Our conference, then, aims to bring the streams of int and practical art production into critical and creativ Organized in collaboration with Tate Liverpool and th Capital: Colony concentrates on, and in, a city that it many of the problems, debates, and opportunities that al Conference a previous AAH section convenors, erence including a three crucial, •e: Capital: Colony, radically to der how their tit be challenged, those whose imporary art ages those ntemporary art and review the impact of ment on the peoples ellectual, academic, r e alignment, e Walker, Culture: self exemplifies conference sessions and plenary discus and convivial event, coincid racing meeting at nearby Ai Liverpool the centre, for a v future of all the world. Our keynote speakers taki opening and the other at t Ades (art historian, Univei (art historian, University c (curator and critic, Cuba a New York). The conference social prog refurbished Walker art gal (Saturday 6 April), and Jo (Sunday 7 April). We hope Capital: Colony, and look Jonathan Harris University of Liverpool. England. ( Fiona Candlin Birkbeck College University of Lor David Craven University of New Mexico. Albuqut Sam Gat her cole University of Livemool. F.ncrianH ( General Conference Information Registration The conference Registration Desk will be open on Friday (from 12 noon), Saturday (from 8.45am), and Sunday (from 9 am). It is located in the ground floor foyer of the Science Block Lecture Theatre Building. In the Mathematics Reading Room, immediately behind Registration, a space will be available for luggage to be left. Refreshments Teas and coffees will be served in two venues: in the foyers of the Science Block Lecture Theatre Building and in the Rendall Building foyer. These drinks will be available on Saturday and Sunday, in the morning and in the afternoon. Lunches will be served in the foyers of the Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, where the cafe, adjacent to the Mathematics Reading Room on the ground floor, will be open during Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all day. The Book Fair The Book Fair in located in the Mathematics Reading Room and the upper foyer of the Science Block Lecture Theatre Building. It will be open: from 1.00-6.00 pm on Friday 5 April, 9.30am-6.00 pm on Saturday 6 April, and 9.30am-5.00pm on Sunday 7 April. Student Assistants Student assistants will be working at the conference, wearing their designer Culture: Capital: Culture t-shirts. Conference Art Exhibition Science Block Lecture Theatre Building foyers Pete Seddon University of Brighton Historiography as Practice: Re-imaging and Re-imagining the English Civil War These digital prints were made as part of an ongoing art practice research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The images are composites of historiographical reference based on paintings, photographs, and prints of Civil War subjects in British art collections, other forms of memorabilia, and personal memories and photographs. The work has been developed through a scheme of mentoring operated by 'Education through Art in the South East' which enables artists to work closely with a curator to reposition their practice. Visits Visits are taking place on Friday afternoon between 12.30 and 3.30pm These have been pre-booked, but it is possible that some places may be available for those who come to the Registration Desk at 12 noon sharp on Friday 5 April. Visits are planned to the Conservation Centre, the Lady Lever Art Gallery, and to the University of Liverpool Art Gallery and Collection. A Walking Tour of Liverpool Architecture is also taking place at this time. Bus Transport A shuttle bus service has been arranged for transport to University of Liverpool halls of residence accommodation from Registration and back on Friday 5 April in the afternoon before the first plenary session at 4.00pm The bus will leave the University, near the Guild of Students building on Mount Pleasant and take conference members to the Derby and Rathbone Halls of Residence on Greenbank Lane and back at the following times. (Please note: the Roscoe and Gladstone Halls of Residence are situated nearby on the same campus as Derby and Rathbone Halls. However, all conference buses will arrive and depart only from Greenbank Lane.) University Derby & Rathbone of Liverpool: Halls of Residence: d.12 noon d.12.30pm d. 1.00pm d. 1.30pm d.2.00pm d. 2.30pm d.3.00pm d.3.30pm Times are approximate. Student assistants will be present at all points. Buses will bring those attending the conference from University halls of residence to the Conference on the mornings of Saturday and Sunday at the following times: Saturday: Derby & Rathbone University Halls of Residence: of Liverpool: d. 8.15am a.8.30am d.8.45am a.9.00am Sunday: Derby & Rathbone University Halls of Residence: of Liverpool: d.8.30am a.8.45am d.9.00am a.9.15am Times are approximate. Buses will take those attending the conference to reception venues on Friday and Saturday evening. On Friday, buses will leave the University, near the Guild of Students building on Mount Pleasant at 6.10pm and 6.25pm, en route to the Walker art gallery. On Saturday buses will leave the University, Guild of Students building on Mount Pleasant at 6.30pm and 6.45pm, en route to Tate Liverpool. Conference dinner (pre-booked at additional cost): Maritime Museum, Albert Dock on Saturday 6 April: 8.30-ll.OOpm Buses will take diners back to the Halls of Residence at 11.15 pm. Receptions On Friday evening a reception will take place at the Walker art gallery, between 6.30-8.00pm. On Saturday evening a reception will take place at Tate Liverpool between 7.00-8.30pm. On Sunday evening a reception will take place at John Moores University Art Gallery between 5.45-7.00pm - a ten-minute walk from the University, with student assistant escorts. Plenary Events First plenary: Dawn Ades and Gerardo Mosquera. 4.00-6.00pm, Friday, Science Block Lecture Theatre 1 Second plenary: Partha Mitter, 2.00-3.30pm, Sunday, Science Block Lecture Theatre 1 AAH Membership It will be possible to join the Association of Art Historians at the Registration Desk. If you would like more information please contact: The Administrator, Association of Art Historians 70 Cower oss Street London EC IN 6BP Tel: 020 7490 3211 E-mail: admin@aah.org.uk The AAH website has full information on membership, subcommittees, and forthcoming conferences: www.aah.org.uk Telephone number for urgent messages Main reception at the University of Liverpool: (0151) 794 2000 Halls of Residence numbers: Derby and Rathbone (0151) 794 6456; Roscoe and Gladstone (0151) 794 6405. Taxi telephone number Davy Liver: (0151) 708 7080 Conference badges should be worn at all times. Contents ACADEMIC SESSIONS Art & Culture of the Other Americas 'Latin American Art':The Critical Discourse from Within Colonial Art in Latin America The Mexican Revolution & its Legacy in the ArtsThe New York School:Trans-Atlantic Interchange with America The Latin-American Left & Avant-garde Art, orJose Carlos Mariategui & Unorthodox Socialism Across the Great Divide, or Trumped by the RaceCard: Native American Art & Mainstream Discourse Cultures of Contemporary Art Race, Culture, & Representation Political Art Now Smelling, Hearing, Tasting, & Touching Art More than Just a Matter of Style ­ On the Practices of Writing on Art Collecting the Colony: Contemporary Thoughts on Imperial Histories Contemporary Art & Matters of Science Computer Arts, the Internet, & Power Public Art, Architecture, Institutions, & Art History 14 The Colonization of Public Space ­the Empowerment of Sculpture 15 The Roles of Visual Tropes in 17th- & 18th­Century Engravings of Colonial Subjects 17 Alternative Modernisms 18 Legitimizing Art in Public: The development of Art Institutions & Exhibitions c.1750-1914 20 Civilized Painting 21 Hybrid Narratives in Contemporary Art The Other Europe: Art, Identity, & Politics in the Shadow of the First World Like a Bat out of Hell? 24 Marxist Art History in the 21st Century 25 Architecture, Society, & the Avant-garde in Post-war Britain 27 New Public Art: 28 Communication & Collaboration 30 Forum Discussions Special Interest Groups 31 Information about Next Year's Conference 33 Index of Abstracts Shuttle Bus from Registration Book Fair Friday 5 April to University Halls of Residence General Information A bus will leave from the University taking 1.00-6.00pm, Science Block Lecture those attending the conference to the Halls Theatre Building, Mathematics Reading Registration of Residence and back, at regular intervals. Room & upper foyer Please remember the two Halls of Residence 12 noon onwards, are a short walk apart. The bus will depart Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, from near the Guild of Students building on lower foyer Mount Pleasant and arrive/depart from Derby and Rathbone Halls on Greenbank Lane. Signs and student assistants will be there to help you (times of buses are stated in the General Conference Information section). Bus transfer from Halls of Refreshments Saturday 6 April Residence to University of Liverpool General Information Departs Derby & Rathbone Halls of Tea&coffee: 10.55-11.25am, Residence on Greenbank Lane, Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, Registration at 8.15am & 8.45am. toyers, & Rendall Building foyer 8.45am onwards, Lunch: 12.30-1.30pm, Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, foyers Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, Book Fair lower foyer Tea & coffee: 2.35-3.15pm, 9.30am-6.00pm, Science Block Lecture Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, Theatre Building, Mathematics Reading Room foyers, & Rendall Building foyer & upper foyer VENU E Science Block Lecture Architecture Seminar Theatre 1 Room 1 SATURDAY The Other Europe: Collecting the Colony: Like a Bat out of Hell? Alternative Modernisms Political Art Now Smelling, Hearing, SESSION TIMES Art, Identity. & Politics Contemporary Thoughts Marxist Art History Tasting. & Touching Art in the Shadow of the on Imperial Histories in the 2 1st Century First World 9-15-9.45 AM 1. Shona Kallestrup 1. John Zarobell 1. O.K. Werckmeister 1. Michael Asbury 1. Patricia Bickers 1. Leslie Hill Cent re / Periphery m Romanian The Global Landscape: Collecting Updating Arnold Hauser's Marxist Is Brazilian Modemismo Politics/Smolrtics & Helen Paris National Artiste Identity c. 1900 Views for the Colonial Archive Account ot Romanesque Art an Alternative Modernism? Ontology of the Otfactory 8-50-10.20 AM 2. Alkis Charalampidis 2. Rainer Buschmann 2. Deborah Ascher 2. Ysanne Holt 2. Mark Hutchinson 2. Deborah Cherry Modem Greek Art & the Manipulating the Barn st one Charies Sims' Spirituals & the Four Types of Art m Search of a She Loved to Breathe ­fa;-•Mode Salvage Paradigm: Modell Deutschland: •Isolation Ward' of the Royal Public: The Political Strategies of Pure Silence Ethnographic Collecting German Pubfcc Art & Architecture Academy m the 1920s Public Art m German New Guinea 10.25-10.55AM 3. Pat Simpson 3. Boris Wastiau 3. David Dunster 3. Karen Lang 3. JJ Charlesworth 3. Clara Ursitti Gender & Identity n Post-Soviet Can Art or Architecture Survive Beckmann & Irv^cocervabte Twin Towers: The Spectacular The Good, the Bad, & the Ugty Art: A View from the West & Displaying the Colonial Subject Urban Regeneration? Modemrsm kiviabiity of Art & Potties m Tervuren. 1910 BREAK U. 25- 11.55AM 4. Katarzyna Murawska-4. Jude Hill 4. Stephen Eisenman 4. J. M. Mancini 4. Jonathan Vickery 4. David Cunningham Muthesius Cultures & Networks of Coiectng; W#am Moms. Pnmrtive Modernism is an Anthology Art Without Administration: Sounds n the Gafcry: Aesthetes. The Strategic Essentiafcm' Traong the Lrves of Henry Communism. & a Dream Art Rachcafcsm & Critique after Sensfcfty. & the New Spaces of Art of the Imagnary Siaka Welcome's Cotection 3f John Be the f>teo-Avant-garde 12-00-12.30PM 5. Susan F. Abasa 5. Gen Doy 5. Richard Meyer 5. Mikkel Bolt 5. Andrew Stooke Reiqtous Defamation/Aesthetic Hot Property'' Coiectng The Subject o< Marxism? Cecil Beaton & the Bad Dream Rasmussen Suspended Expectations: Denunciation: The Errvargence of Abcngnal Art n Austratan Art of Modernism Exodus or Intervention? From IS . On Performance with Audience a Soviet Musec4ogy under Stain Museums 1980-1995 & Autonoma to Contemporary Art UJNCH 1 30-2.OO PM 6. Mathew Rampley 6. Kavita Singh 6. Alexandra Stara 6. Ben Fit ton 6 Discussion Period Warburg & Others: Art History Curzon's C^tectxxi of PertorrnatMty Theory & Visual Modem City. Ancient Streets: Shrflng Posrtjons n the Shadow of War Indian Artefacts Culture - A Marxist Cntjque PjkxDris' Aa-opofc Protect 2 05-2 351 7. Maria Gough Hybrid Narratives in Contemporary Art & More than Just a Matter Lrssrtzkys Derrxxistratjon Space Contemporary Art Matters of Science of Style - on the Practices 1. Yvonne Scott of Writing on Art Balancing Ag*e Mont age Landscape Unbound: 1. Carol Magee Soence & the Redefinrton Rearing between the Lne s at the at Landscape n Art National Museum of African Art. Washington DC Contents ACADEMIC SESSIONS Art & Culture of the Other Americas 'Latin American Art':The Critical Discourse from Within Colonial Art in Latin America The Mexican Revolution & its Legacy in the ArtsThe New York School:Trans-Atlantic Interchange with America The Latin-American Left & Avant-garde Art, orJose Carlos Mariategui & Unorthodox Socialism Across the Great Divide, or Trumped by the RaceCard: Native American Art & Mainstream Discourse Cultures of Contemporary Art Race, Culture, & Representation Political Art Now Smelling, Hearing, Tasting, & Touching Art More than Just a Matter of Style ­ On the Practices of Writing on Art Collecting the Colony: Contemporary Thoughts on Imperial Histories Contemporary Art & Matters of Science Computer Arts, the Internet, & Power Public Art, Architecture, Institutions, & Art History 14 The Colonization of Public Space ­the Empowerment of Sculpture 36 15 17 18 20 The Roles of Visual Tropes in 17th- & 18th­Century Engravings of Colonial Subjects Alternative ModernismsLegitimizing Art in Public: The developmentof Art Institutions & Exhibitions c.1750-1914 37 39 41 21 Civilized PaintingHybrid Narratives in Contemporary Art 43 45 The Other Europe: Art, Identity, & Politicsin the Shadow of the First World 47 24 Like a Bat out of Hell?Marxist Art History in the 21st Century 49 25 27 28 Architecture, Society, & the Avant-gardein Post-war Britain New Public Art:Communication & Collaboration 51 53 30 Forum Discussions 55 31 33 Special Interest GroupsInformation about Next Year's ConferenceIndex of Abstracts 56 56 57 Shuttle Bus from Registration Book Fair Friday 5 April to University Halls of Residence General Information A bus will leave from the University taking 1.00-6.00pm, Science Block Lecture those attending the conference to the Halls Theatre Building, Mathematics Reading Registration of Residence and back, at regular intervals. Room & upper foyer Please remember the two Halls of Residence 12 noon onwards, are a short walk apart. The bus will depart Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, from near the Guild of Students building on lower foyer Mount Pleasant and arrive/depart from Derby and Rathbone Halls on Greenbank Lane. Signs and student assistants will be there to help you (times of buses are stated in the General Conference Information section). Bus transfer from Halls of Refreshments Saturday 6 April Residence to University of Liverpool General Information Departs Derby & Rathbone Halls of Tea&coffee: 10.55-11.25am, Residence on Greenbank Lane, Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, Registration at 8.15am & 8.45am. foyers, & Rendall Building foyer 8.45am onwards, Lunch: 12.30-1.30pm, Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, foyers Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, Book Fair lower foyer Tea & coffee: 2.35-3.15pm, Science Block Lecture Theatre Building, 9.30am-6.00pm, Science Block Lecture foyers, & Rendall Building foyer Theatre Building. Mathematics Reading Room & upper foyer VENUE Science Block Lecture Architecture Seminar Theatre 1 Room l SATURDAY The Other Europe: Collecting the Colony: Like a Bat out of Hell? Alternative Modernisms Political Art Now Smelling, Hearing, Art. Identity. & Politics Contemporary Thoughts Marxist Art History Tasting. & Touching Art in the Shadow of the on Imperial Histories in the 21st Century First World SESSION TIMES 815-9.45 AM 1. Shona Kallestrup 1. John Zarobell 1. O.K. Werckmeister 1. Michael Asbury 1. Patricia Bickers 1. Leslie Hill Centre/Periphery m Romanian The Global Landscape: Coflectng Updating Arnold Hauser's Marxist Is Brazilian Modemtsmo PoMics/SmoMics &; Helen Paris National Artistic identity c. 1900 Views for the Cc*omal Archrve Account of Romanesque Art an Alternative Modernism? Ontology of the Olfactory 9.50-10.20AM 2. Alkis Charalampidis 2. Rainer Buschmann 2. Deborah Ascher 2. Y sanne Holt 2. Mark Hutchinson 2 Deborah Cherry Modern Greek Art & the Manipulating the Barnstone Charles Sims' Spntuats & the Four Types of An m Search of a She Loved to Breathe ­Centre/Penphery Model Salvage Paradigm: Modefl DeutschJand: 'Isolation Ward' of the Royal Pubhc: The PoMical Strategies of Fre5 sr e Ethnography Collecting German Pubfcc Art & Architecture Academy n the 1920s in German New Guinea 10.25—10.55 AM 3. Pat Simpson 3. Boris Wastiau 3. David Dunster 3. Karen Lang 3. J J Charles worth 3. Clara Urslttl Gender & Identity in Post-Soviet Collecting, Selecting. Can Art or Architecture Survive Deckma i S ncor »wabte Twn Towers The Spectacular T^Gocd.theBad.&theUgry Art: A View from the West & Displaying the Colonial Subject Urban Regeneration'' '.' • Ian srr InvisOity of Art & PofrtJCS in Tervuren. 1910 BREAK 11.25-11.55AM 4. Katarzyna Murawska-4 Jude Hill 4. Stephen Eisenman 4. J. M. Mancini 4. Jonathan Vickery 4. David Muthesius Cultures & Networks of Cotectng: W*am Moms. Pnrnrtive Modernism ts an Anthology Art Without Adnirirstration: Cunningham The' Strategic Esserrbaftsm' Tnaong the Lives of Henry Communem, & a Dream Art Radcafcsm & Critique after Sounds n the Gatery- Aesthetics. of the imaginary Stefca WeteornesCctaction the Neo- Avant-garde Sensfc*ty. & The New Spaces of An 5. Adam Jolles 5. Susan F. Abasa 5. Gen Doy 5. Richard Meyer 5. Mikkel Bolt 5. Andrew Stooke Reigous DetamatoV Aesthete Hot Property"? Cotectng The Subject o* Marxism'' Ceci Beaton & the Bad Dream Suspended Expectations: Denunciation: The Emergence of Abcngjnal Art n AustraSan Art Of Mcderntsrn Exodus or Interventjon? From IS On Performance with Auctence a Soviet Museotogy under Sta*n Museums 1980-1995 & Autonomia to Corrtemporary Art 6. Matbew Rampley 6. Kavita Singh 6. Andrew Kennedy 6. Alexandra Stara 6. Ben Fit ton 6 Dscussoi Penod. Warburg & Others: An History Curzon's Cotectjon of Penomratrvrfy Theory & Vsuarf Modem City- Anoent Streets: Shrftng Posrbons r the Shadow of War Indian Artefacts Culture - A Marxist Critique Pioorns' Acropofc Project *05-2.35PM 7. Maria Gough Contemporary Art & Hybrid Narratives in More than Just a Matter Ussrtzky's Demonstrabon Space Contemporary Art Matters of Science of Style - on the Practices 1. Joshua Mosley 1. Yvonne Scott of Writing on Art Batanang Agte Montage Landscape Unoound: 1. Carol Magee Science & the P«definrtion Reacin g between the Lnes at the of Landscape r\ An National Museum of Afncan Art. WashngtonDC Visits These are occurring between 12.30 & 3.30pm. Inquire at the Registration Desk it you have not pre-booked - there may be places still available: Conservation Centre Lady Lever Art Gallery (visit starts at 12.15pm because of transport requirements) Walking Tour of Liverpool Architecture University of Liverpool Art Gallery & Collection Forum Discussions 3.15-4.15pm AAH Journals - the Future Science Block Lecture Theatre 1 Cultural Capitals/Colonizing Centres Science Block Lecture Theatre 2 Walter Benjamin, the Collector/Allegorist, & Art History Rendall Building Seminar Room 1 Teaching & Learning in Art History Science Block Lecture Theatre 4 Future Feminists - Feminism's Future Science Block Lecture Theatre 3 Artists & Contemporary Politics Rendall Building Seminar Room 2 Computer Arts, the Internet, & Power 1. Alessandro Imperato Net Art. the White Cube. & the •World Wide Web' i. Sarah Parsons !)oflective Sites for Remembering: magrwig Slavery n Vrtual Space 3. Alan Schechner Packets of Resistance Net Art as Poktical Activism 4. Salomi Voepelin FtuKity & Fixing: Digital Obstacles or Irrimaterial Commoclrlies? 5. John Byrne Apocalypse Then: Cybersubirne & the Work of Chris Cunningham Rendall Building Seminar Room 1 'Latin American Art": The Critical Discourse from Within 1 Juan A. Martinez Introduction: The Dscourse from Wfthn 2. Florencia I Nelson From Global to Reojonal: Maria Trace's Definitions of Latin An a ; 2- Art 3. Holly Barnet-Sanchez Rasouachismo & Domesticana: Aspects of Chtcancv'a Aesthetics & the Art Grrtiasm of Tomas Ybarra 4. Andrea Giunta Rewriting Modernism: Romero Brest & Other Geneatoges for Modem Art 5. Alejandro Aureus GntiCMng the Critique: Some Trvjughts on Latin American Art Crtbctsm 6. DBcussion Period. Refreshments Tea & coffee: 3.15-4.00pm, Science Block Lecture Theatre, foyers Plenary Event Dawn Ades & Gerardo Mosquera: 'Latin America: Culture, Capital, Colony' Chair: David Craven Science Block Lecture Theatre 1, 4.00-6.00pm Special Interest Group Meetings 4.20-5.50 pm Universities & Colleges Science Block Lecture Theatre 1 Art Galleries & Museums Science Block Lecture Theatre 2 Students Science Block Lecture Theatre 3 Independents Science Block Lecture Theatre 4 Legitimizing Art in Public: the development of Art Institutions & Exhibitions,c. 1750-1914 1. Angela M. Opel 'Un ouvrage compose dans un goutnouveau': The Development of 'ArtDciactics' & Pubic Display under the Sector Palatinate. 1750-1800 2. Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch A National Gatery for Ireland: Issues of Icteotogcal Stgnrficance 3. Fae Brauer Ther-fers^encec*lnstJtufx^R>«erThe French State, the Academy &C*ficai Art ri thetimeof Cubem 4. Anne Nellis Colecting for the 1 Pubhc' in the Domestic Interor. 1798-1824 5. Laura Newton To Educate the Eye & the Soul': The Newcastle ExhOtions c.1863-1890 6. Helen Rees Contesting the Canon of Heritage: The Burtngton Magazine & the National Gatery. Lxrx*Xi.T903--19l1 An as a Matter of Owe Pnde: The Slain i daotoghi ­Civilized Painting 1. Tony Halllday Rearranging Academe Hierarchies 2. Duncan Forbes Historical Subject Parrtng n Scotland 1820-1850 3. Colin Trodd Artful AnnMations & Generations of the Pubfcc. or Veteran Art Crrrosm & the ImpcssWrty of Wftam Bteke 4. Elizabeth Prettejohn Swribume. Potrtcai Erx^agernent. & 'Art for Art's Sake' 5. Paul Barlow Picasso's Watts: Or •Prrvatizng' Pubfcc Art 6. Nina Ltibbren The Historical Anecdote Reception Walker art gallery (kindly sponsored by Laurence King publishers to launch tin Fleming Prize for Art History), 6.30-8.1 Bus transfer: 6.10pm & 6.25pm, froi University of Liverpool, near Guild of S building on Mount Pleasant, with studi assistants on hand Reception Tate Liverpool (superbly sponsored b Blackwell publishers to celebrate 251 the AAH journal Art History), 7.00-8. Bus transfer: 6.30pm & 6.45pm fr University of Liverpool, near Guild of building on Mount Pleasant, with stu< assistants on hand. Conference Dinner This pre-booked event will take plac at the Maritime Museum, Albert Do< 8.30-11.00pm. Buses will take diner; to the Halls of Residence at 11.15 pm Colonial Art in Latin America 1. Marjorie Trusted So What was New7 Sculpture m Spain & Mexico in the 16th & 17th Centunes 2. Eleanor Wake Native AppropriationDf the European Grotesque n the Art of 16th Century Mexico 3 Beatriz Caceres-Pefaur Masked Heads m the Refcgtous Architecture o< Arequpa, Peru. between the 17th Si 8th Centunes 4. Adrian Locke Movers & Shakers: H»ghJ»ghtingFtegjonal Identity through the ton­ography of the Colonel Peruvian Earthquake Chnsts of Uma&Cu9C0 5. Renate Dohmen Pattern & Guttural identity ­Contemporary Trarjrbcnal Sh»*x>Conrfx) Art cfescussed from a Con­temporary Theoretical Perspective Reccnsxlenng Cotonai Art rt Latin Amenca The Coloniza Public Space Empowerme: Sculpture 1. Reuben Fo Pubhc Sculpture I Revolution of 195 2. LorettanD The Berlin Wall: From Border to O 3. Joe Kerr Absence r\ Pubic the Failure of Scu Aftermath of War 4. Paul Ushei Coiery Disaster * & the Constructio 5. Annie Geri Martres Chez Mo & Linguistic Man*" TrieMamonaltoVi & the Cornptexitje The Latin-At & Avant-gan Jose Carlos 1 & Unorthodc Art and Culture of the Other Americas Section Convenor: David Craven University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA The term 'Latin America' has been the subject of rece several scholars. As is now becoming clear, the desigi America' for an area embracing half the hemisphere \ by European colonizers than it was by progressive in whom post-colonial self-determination in politics, as a defining, multinational aim. (Much the same could 1 the coinage of the term 'Third World' during the late the original conception of 'Latin America' will be the tc in one session, so the enduring accomplishments and o in the arts of Latin America will be addressed in variou within this section on the Americas. Amongst the key themes to be discussed will be the n< to international art criticism by Latin Americans sine the emergence of the New Left and the impact of the C had momentous consequences for the arts. Any curre] postmodernism in relation to post-colonial art or the modernism can hardly proceed very far without takin Marta Traba and Juan Acha or Gerardo Mosquera ant If the terms of debate within art criticism were advan changes of the 1960s, modern art had already been in throughout Latin America by the Mexican Revolution process had a formative impact on subsequent develo] region not only through the 'Mexican Mural Renaissa but also through printmaking via the Taller de Grafic 1930s, and the distinctive type of multilateral vangua by Estridentismo in 1921. A focal concern will be one the rich legacy of 'socialist pluralism' in the arts, whi in Mexico and then enjoyed a potent afterlife in Nicar Another session wil l feature a concerted look at t cultures' that date back to the creation of Westeri hegemony in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth i in this area will analyse the 'pre-history' of revolul policy in the 20th century by looking at the emergence among indigenous ethnic groups of counter-cultural movement that would create a tradition of subaltern cultural practices with anti-colonial intent. Another session will address not only the interplay of past and present, of North and South, but also the trans-Atlantic interchange of New York School art and the counter-movements of 'arte informal' that emerged in Spain during the Franco years. The dissident artistic practices associated with this group of artists will be examined in light of its counterpart in Abstract Expressionism, as represented by Spanish emigres like Esteban Vicente and Jose Guerrero. Engage and ideologically recalcitrant artworks have long been linked to various Native American figures in the US artworld, such as Jimmie Durham and James Luna. Accordingly, one session will focus in particular on Durham and the profound challenges to arise from his distinctive artistic practice. Finally, another session will critically survey an indigenous theoretical attempt in the Americas to articulate what has been most instructive about almost all of the above noted issues in Latin American art and culture. This session will look at the remarkably innovative thought of Jose Carlos Mariategui of Peru. Because of the suppleness and openness of his unorthodox variant of Marxism, Mariategui is often seen as the 'other Americas' answer to Antonio Gramsci. Both of these left wing theorists were in fact quite important to art and cultural during the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions. Few other contemporary art critics are better placed to address virtually all the issues noted above than Cuban author Gerardo Mosquera (who in the last two decades has served as a curator for numerous exhibitions of international scope and matching significance). A world expert on contemporary Latin American art and a student of Mariategui, Mosquera has been chosen, along with the renowned art historian Dawn Ades, to give keynote addresses. Their opening talks will help to set the terms for the sessions operating under this banner. 'Latin American Art': The Critical Discourse from Within Juan A. Martinez Florida International University, USA Alejandro An re us William Paterson University, USA An extraordinary recognition of 'Latin American' art began in the 1990s in both Europe and the United States. Major international exhibitions with ambitious catalogues, anthologies of art and cultural criticism, and thematic issues in international magazines have defined and categorized the problematic concept of a 'Latin American' art during the past decade. Although some of the critics defining the contemporary production and marketing of art from Latin America or by Latin Americans have been outside observers, since the early 1960s there have been an increasing number of significant local commentators. Marta Traba, Juan Acha, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Nelly Richard, Gerardo Mosquera and others have been creating a critical narrative of Latin America from within. Among the themes most discussed by these critics are the existence of a Utopian Latin American identity, a culture of resistance, the dynamics of Periphery/Center relationships, and the meanings of Modernity and Post modernity in the context of Latin America. 1. Introduction: Juan A. Martinez The Discourse from Within 2. Florencia Bazzano-Nelson Georgia State University, USA From Global to Regional: Marta Traba's Definitions of Latin American Art Marta Traba's career as an art critic spanned from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. During these four decades, Traba's critical approach to the definition of 'Latin American art' underwent changes so significant that they problematize interpretations that present her views as homogeneous. This paper will explore a shift in Traba's position about the art of Latin America through the analysis of two important texts: her essay 'What Does "An American Art" Mean?', published in 1955 in the Colombian journal Mito, and her book Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin American Plastic Arts, published in 1973, but written, in its first version, around 1969. In the 1950s, Traba denied the existence of a 'Latin American art'. In accordance with an internationalist vision of modernism she inherited from Jorge Romero Brest, she denounced as detrimental fictions the definitions of national and continental identities inscribed in the work of Colombian and Mexican muralists. In the 1960s, after confronting the challenge of the Cuban revolution, political persecution, and the influence of the United States over the culture of ART AND CULTURE OF THE OTHER AMERICAS the hemisphere, Traba reformulated her critical framework. She abandoned her earlier aestheticism and favoured an art whose ideological edge and ability to produce critical meanings required stronger links to its community of origin. While these two texts show a shift from the global to the regional, both coincide in one important regard: they give a sense of the theoretical horizon available to Latin American art critics during the 1950s and 1960s. 3. Holly Barnet-Sanchez University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA Rasquachismo and Domesticana: Aspects of Chicano/a Aesthetics and the Art Criticism of Tomas Ybarra Chicano/a art began in the late 1960s in support of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and developed into an art movement in its own right by the early 1970s. Although there were a few artists and art historians such as Tim Drescher, Rupert Garcia, Carmen Lomas Garza, Shifra Goldman, Yolanda Lopez, Malaquias Montoya, Patricia Rodriguez, and Pedro Rodriguez, among others, who wrote, spoke about, and taught Chicano/a art, it wasn't until after 1985 that the aesthetics of Chicano/a art was addressed or theorized in a meaningful fashion. This artistically and politically delicate issue was first approached by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, a Stanford University professor of Chicano literature who had developed an ongoing interest in the visual arts. His concept of rasquachismo - an aesthetics of 'los de abajo' that has been articulated in a number of publications beginning with the 1991 CARA exhibition catalogue ­encapsulated many of the public and private debates among Chicano/a artists as well as contributed a concrete structure by which to view and understand many aspects (but not all) of Chicano/a visual expression. In the early 1990s, artist, scholar, critic, and educator, Amalia Mesa-Bains, added a refinement or additional layering to Ybarra­Frausto's conceptual structure which by then had become a familiar element of the discourse on Chicano/a art, with the publication of her specifically feminine/feminist aesthetic construct of domesticana, which she saw as an adjunct to or elaboration of rasquachismo. This paper seeks to analyze, in some detail, these two structures of art criticism created within the Chicano/a art movement and to analyze the implications of the ideas imbedded in them for (a) the analysis of works of Chicano/a art, and (b) the further development of a complex, multilayered, and effective art critical discourse for the understanding of Chicano/a art and its connections to other Latino/a art, Latin American art, mainstream art of the United States and Europe as well as other artistic production labelled either as Third World or 'diasporic'. 4. Andrea Giunta Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina Rewriting Modernism: Romero Brest and Other Genealogies for Modern Art ABSTRACTS The purpose of this paper is to analyze the strategies Romero Brest elaborated in order to explain Pop Art without breaking with tradition. In 1962 the Argentinian art critic Jorge Romero Brest was for the first time in front of an Oldenburg hamburger made of canvas filled with rubber foam and cardboard boxes. Years later he wrote about the shock he received looking at a work of art that was in total contradiction to all he had learned and taught about the development of modern art. For Romero Brest, who had spent a lot of energy trying to introduce the idea of modern art into Latin America and into the art of his own country, Argentina, this was terribly upsetting. Romero Brest was a seminal critic in Latin America. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was in a situation comparable to that of Clement Greenberg. Just like the American critic, Brest had defended formalism and high art against kitsch and the effects of the widespread consequences of industrial civilization. But instead of taking Greenberg's position that defined him as representative of modernism against the emergent aesthetics, Brest tried to understand the changes. As the Director of the Instituto Di Telia - an experimental centre whose main objective was to establish Argentinian art in the world - he couldn't close the doors to what seemed to be the 'new' art. The conceptual contradictions of Brest's critical and curatorial discourses reproduced the traps that beset the artistic development of a country that, from the periphery, was awaiting the appropriate context to leap into the hub of the centre. This paper will focus on a paradigmatic critic to understand the process of Latin American art in the 1960s. 5. Conclusion: Alejandro Aureus Critiquing- the Critique: Some Thoughts ou Latin American Art Criticism The art criticism that we might define as 'Modern' emerged in Latin America as a commentary on the manifestations of avant-garde art in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Cuba. The stylistic roots of these criticisms are to be found in polemical journalism as well as literary criticism. Conceptually, these criticisms synthesized a concern for the authentically national, the formal innovations of the avant­garde, and a utopic aspiration with Marxist dimensions. Authors like Andrade, Vallejo, Borges, Novo and Carpentier wrote some of this early criticism, so did theorists/ philosophers like Mariategui, Vasconcelos, Marinello and Mahach. In the mid-to-late 1930s a slew of 'professional' art critics emerge: Julio Payro and Jorge Romero Brest in Argentina, Guy Perez Cisneros and Jose Gomez Sicre in Cuba, and most significantly the Guatemalan Luis Cardoza y Aragon (who is also an important poet), who would produce his entire body of work as an exile in Mexico. Cardoza's discourse synthesized a lyrical prose with the aesthetic openness of Surrealism, as well as a Marxist understanding for the social basis of art. After Cardoza, the criticism becomes denser and more dynamic; we can state simplistically that art criticism from the late 1950s through the 1960s in the Spanish-speaking Americas could be seen as a polemic between Mexico's Raquel Tibol and Colombia's Marta Traba (both Argentinean women!). Tibol comes out of the 'Old Left' and her discourse is connected to Mexican muralism, particularly Siqueiros, while Traba reflects the 'New Left' and her discourse is connected with both Informalismo and Neo-Figuracion. After Traba, and perhaps because of her, critical theory enters the mainstream of art criticism in Latin America. Juan Acha, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Nelly Richard, and Gerardo Mosquera are only possible in a 'post-Traba' environment. Marxism, particularly connected to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, is a significant component in all of this. Yet the question remains: can there be an independent, truly critical, even Marxist, art criticism in Latin America, which avoids 'the party line' regarding Cuba and the institutionalization of the Left? 6. Discussion Period. Colonial Art in Latin America Valerie Fraser University of Essex, England This session will seek to explore the diversity of the visual arts in Latin America during the colonial period. To say that the culture of colonial Latin America was extraordinarily heterogeneous is not to ignore the fact that it was founded on the domination of indigenous American and African people by the Europeans; but just as these three populations were not homogeneous in themselves, neither was the art they produced. The session aims to be inclusive in terms of media (painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, jewellery, furniture, etc) and of the racial and cultural background of artists and patrons. Recent research is revealing how some of the many distinctive categories of colonial art can be explained in terms of very specific local or regional conditions: rivalry between different groups (between Creoles and peninsulares, for example); the ambitions of surviving members of an indigenous nobility; the availability of a particular material or technical skill; the continuity of an indigenous sacred geography. 1 Marjorie Trusted Victoria & Albert Museum, England So What was New? Sculpture in Spain and Mexico in the 16th and 17th Centuries Almost immediately after the conquest of Mexico in the early sixteenth century, the Spanish began to build churches in their new world, as well as make, have made, or import from the Iberian Peninsula, devotional sculpture and altarpieces. These works are sometimes difficult to attribute or date; perhaps more intriguingly it is frequently hard to state whether the artists responsible were native Indians schooled and supervised by members of the ART AND CULTURE OF THE OTHER AMERICAS religious Orders, or were Spanish artists who had travelled over from Europe seeking work, or whether the works themselves were imported from Seville. To what extent was the imagery, style, form, and colour of painted sculpture in fact derived from native Mexican or Guatemalan traditions, combined often strangely but fruitfully with Christian iconography? Certain subjects, such as the archangel Michael, may have been considered particularly appropriate by the conquistadors, but may also have accorded with existing pagan figures and ideas. I shall be looking at individual works of art in or from Mexico, and discussing what they might mean in their colonial context. 2. Eleanor Wake, SLLC/Birkbeck College, University of London, England Native Appropriation of the European Grotesque in the Art of Sixteenth Century Mexico The introduction of European art forms into New Spain gave exceptional presence to the Renaissance grotesque. Understood by the invader as a decorative tool and therefore 'safe' at a thematic level, native artists were encouraged to copy its designs directly from illustrations in imported books onto the walls of their new churches and other public buildings. Clear from many examples of grotesque friezes of the period, however, is that in the hands of native artists the source material underwent a process of reworking. This is usually seen to occur in the form of inserts of native origin and/or the manipulation of European motifs to give a native reading, suggesting that the same artists were not approaching the grotesque as an ornamental assemblage but something more akin to the pictographic texts of their own tradition. In this context, references to mythology and ritualized activities such as singing and dancing can certainly be recognized. The excellent preservation of the mural paintings and grotesque friezes in the Augustinian monastery church at Ixmiquilpan (Hgo.) shows that at this site the same European original was manipulated several times to create a set of friezes which not only read as a ('christianized') native warrior song, but appear to function at the level of a choreographed performance around the walls of the ritual arena which is the nave itself. 3. Beatriz Caceres-Pefaur Universidad de los Andes Merida, Venezuela Masked Heads in the Religious Architecture of Arequipa, Peru, between the 17 th and 18 th Centuries This paper will be delivered in Spanish. Notes in English will be available. The last third of the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century represent a period of church construction in Arequipa using volcanic stone. This material lends itself to carving and stimulated the creative imagination of the local craftsmen, who incorporated a variety of thematic motifs - some of European origins and others rooted in pre­hispanic iconography - into the decoration of the church facades. This tendency has been called mestizo baroque. Among the details the masked heads or speaking figures stand out. In these, puma heads spout volutes from their open jaws in a form of visual representation of indigenous myths and legends. These examples are most obvious in the churches of Yanahuara and Cayma built in the indigenous settlements of the same name, in the Jesuit church of the Compahia and in others built during this period. The interpretation of their significance could be an example of religious syncretism. Of Arequipenan origins, the influence of this style extended to other places in the altiplano region. 4. Adrian Locke Royal Academy, London, England Movers and Shakers: Highlighting Regional Identity through the Iconography of the Colonial Peruvian Earthquake Christs of Lima and Cusco The decision by Pizarro not to develop Cuzco as the colonial administrative capital, which led to the founding of Ciudad de los Reyes in 1535, exacerbated an already present schism in colonial Peru. This meant that there was little communication between the coast and the highlands. Whereas Cuzco retained an essentially native Peruvian identity emphasized by the presence of substantial Inca ruins Lima consciously developed a European character. The emergence of two cults associated with earthquakes, El Sehor de los Temblores in Cuzco, and El Sehor de los Milagros in Lima in the 1650s epitomises the differences between both cities. Temblores of Cuzco cathedral was constructed using an indigenous technique and was rapidly assimilated into a network of regional shrines closely associated with the pre-Columbian sacred landscape of the region consequently becoming the dominant regional Christian cult. The mural of Milagros (of the Nazarenes convent) was a minor cult until a surge of popularity in the 20th century elevated it to its position as the city's major shrine. Subsequent histories of Milagros have failed to prove that it was associated with the pre-Columbian shrine of Pachacamac. 5. Renate Dohmen University of Newcastle, England Pattern and Cultural Identity - Contemporary Traditional Shipibo-Conibo Art discussed from a Contemporary Theoretical Perspective I will discuss the ceramic and textile decorations of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians (Peru) and their reflection in colonial, anthropological, and aesthetic discourses. Initially seen as 'harmless' activity of native women, missionaries encouraged these 'traditional' arts, thus unwittingly supporting the very belief systems they otherwise sought to eradicate. Next Shipibo-Conibo art attracted worldwide interest among art collectors and solicited intense anthropological scrutiny in order to crack the 'code' of these perplexing and highly accomplished designs. But, while highly appreciated, the style nonetheless remained enigmatic, not yielding its modus operandi even when subjected to tenacious investigations. Furthermore, with ABSTRACTS their maxim never to repeat designs and with their distinct appreciation of individual creators, the Shipibo-Conibo persistently frustrate expectations of a 'primitive' lack of originality and of 'primitive art' perse. Sketching cultural contexts and beliefs, the presentation will hence critically examine past 'tried and tested' and yet unsuccessful approaches, isolating areas where adjustments need to be made to not totally miss - what is the point though? The issue of Western fantasies of knowability and translatability of cultures will be raised and suggestions made for productive shifts of perspective, framing a polycentric post­colonial approach to the discussion of this visual practice. 6. Valerie Fraser Reconsidering Colonial Art in Latin America Guaman Poma's famous image of the encounter between the Inca Huayna Capac and Pizarro's envoy Pedro de Candia neatly encapsulates an idea of almost total incomprehension: not only do the two men not speak the same language, they cannot even share a meal because they seem not to agree about the nature of food. Colonial culture was very much more complex, of course, as Guaman Poma was well aware, but the literature on colonial art has had a similar tendency to oversimplification. The traditional art historical categories - of medium, style and subject matter, of influence and invention - rarely fit the material comfortably. This paper explores the mismatch between the historiography and the art itself, and looks in particular at the casfe paintings as a metaphor for the complexity of colonial society, and as an example of the problems we face in studying colonial art. 7. Discussion Period. The Mexican Revolution and its Legacy in the Arts Linda B. HaU University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA Kathleen Howe University Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA This session is intended to engage discussion on the ways in which the consolidation of the aims of the Mexican Revolution and reaction to the institutionalization of the revolution were manifest in the arts. Papers will address the revolutionary legacy in, for instance, painting, printmaking, photography, film, performance, and sculpture, and in national and international contexts. 1. Tatiana Flores Columbia University, USA Imagining the Mexican Nation: Fernando Leal's First Mural Mexico's mural movement emerged soon after the end of the Mexican Revolution and is often regarded as paradigmatic of the revolutionary legacy in the visual arts. Accounts about muralism, however, have tended to focus on the work of specific painters, particularly the trio of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Departing from the idea that the early development of the Mexican mural movement warrants a closer investigation, my paper examines one of the first murals produced in Mexico City: Fernando Leal's The Dancers ofChalma painted between 1922-1923 in the National Preparatory School. The Dancers ofChalma marks a turning point in the history of Mexican art, for it introduces the characteristic types that were to become a staple of the 'Mexican School' in the ensuing decades, and, more importantly, it is the first mural to grapple with the complicated issues of national identity in post-revolutionary Mexico. Leal depicts a scene of contemporary 'Mexicans': a group of costumed Indians dancing in tribute to the Black Christ in the church of Chalma, surrounded by worshipers. The mural reveals the tensions inherent in the forceful conversion of native peoples to Catholicism and the resulting syncretism. My paper discusses how this mural questions the possibility of ever achieving a unified nation, given the cultural and social differences among the Mexican peoples. Using Benedict Anderson's notion of 'imagined communities', I show how The Dancers of Chalma stands as testament to a unique moment in Mexican history, when creating a 'Mexican nation' was imperative, but nonetheless difficult to imagine. 2. Helen Thomas University of Essex, England Aestheticizing the Wilderness: Mexico City's Open Air Schools In early postcolonial Mexico the nation was still defined from its urban centres. The rural was perceived of, if at all, as an uncivilized wilderness. This paper argues that the post-Revolutionary reconfiguration of the Mexican nation required that these rural territories and the cultures of their inhabitants become politicized, aestheticized, and brought into the urban imagination. The role of the open-air schools that flourished at the fringes of Mexico City from 1913, in places like Santa Anita, will be the focus of this discussion. Far from providing for artists painting for a privileged market, classes were used as an instrument of cultural fusion and included young people living at the edges of the city belonging to Indio and Mestizo classes. Students were encouraged to intuit a sense of Mexico through contemplation and expression of their physical surroundings. For more conventional art students, too, the classes substituted direct expenence of the natural landscape for the closed classrooms of the urban Academy, and Mexico's landscape became recognized as an aesthetic experience, dynamic, and relevant to the present. A brief conclusion will look at the impact of these schools in post-war ART AND CULTURE OF THE OTHER AMERICAS constructed landscapes such as 'Jardines del Pedregal', where this aestheticized wilderness became a commodity. 3. Joy James Henley University of British Columbia, Canada Picturing the Impossible: Tina Modotti's 'Colonia de la Bolsa' Photographs Questions of national identity are called up in Tina Modotti's photographs of what was at the time one of the poorest barrios of Mexico City: Colonia de la Bolsa. These images were taken in 1927-1928 and subsequently published in the Mexican Communist Party newspaper El Machete. Whereas, photographs have often been used to produce an illusion of continuity - to weave together a coherent narrative where otherwise there is none -I propose that this series of photographs were engaged in a contrary performance: that they threatened to fragment or undo an existing narrative of coherence and continuity that mobilized a particular hegemonic construction of the identity of Mexican peasantry. Within a year of making these photographs Modotti was imprisoned and then deported from Mexico for plotting against the State. In addition to examining how these photographs performed the work of undoing identities, I will map the ways in which they also cleared imaginary spaces of alternate identities for Modotti herself. Sounding the double movement in these images will show how these photographs may have been productive in previously unacknowledged ways. 4. Discussion period. The New York School: Trans-Atlantic Interchange with America Maria Dolores Jimenez-Bianco Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain According to mainstream art history, art in America and in Europe in the 20th century seems to have led two separate lives. While European art did not look beyond its boundaries, conscious of its world primacy based on past glories, American efforts towards modernism were focussed on the liberation from Europe (also in the field of art), by seeking a differentiated artistic identity. After the Second World War, in contrast, international artists started to feel the attraction of the new art mecca: New York City. The truth, however, is that under the apparent surface of isolation there were many links between European and American art, even before the appearance of the New York School. This is supported by several facts: many of the most representative American artists of abstract expressionism paid special attention to painters such as Picasso and Miro, American sculptors like David Smith had their artistic model in the then unknown Julio Gonzalez, while young European artists sought international recognition through the approval of American museums and critics. The objective of this session will be to study this trans-Atlantic interchange, which has been only occasionally alluded to in art historiography, and that often has been ignored because the artists involved were somewhat marginal within conventional art-historical accounts. 1. Nancy Jachec Oxford Brookes University, England Afro's 'Garden of Hope' UNESCO Murals, 1958: Gesture Painting as a World Aesthetic Although the Italian gesture painter Afro is little-known today, he was an artist of international stature during the late 1950s and early 1960s, as his being commissioned to decorate the new halls for UNESCO, Paris in 1958, and his receipt of the Guggenheim International Award of 1960, indicate. Described as the 'fulcrum' between New York and Rome, he enjoyed a successful career in New York, and was instrumental in bringing exhibitions of many American Abstract Expressionist works to Italy. Afro was committed to artistic exchange between Italy and the US, and archival evidence shows that his interest in American art was fostered by the US State Department's Leader Program, designed to bolster support for an Atlanticist European Union. Mindful of Italy's leading role in the formation of the EEC, and using his Garden of Hope murals for UNESCO as a case study, this paper will consider the political meanings Afro and his commissioners may have assigned to gesture painting at this truly international venue. It will seek to resolve whether gesture painting remained emblematic of 'Americanism' at this site, or whether it acquired a new political meaning more suitable for representing UNESCO upon that institution's launch of its search for a 'universal culture'. 2. Alison Green Oxford Brookes University, England Painting the New York School's Second Generation The influence of European emigre artists, from Matta to Duchamp, on the formation of Abstract Expressionist painting has already been established. This paper focuses on the group of artists emerging directly after this 'first' generation, sometimes referred to as the New York School's 'second generation'. It establishes for the first time the network of influences between Europe and America that occurred during the decade of the 1950s. Painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Alfred Jensen spent the early 1950s in Europe, while European- born artists, like Giorgio Cavallon, Jan Muller, and Wolf ABSTRACTS Kahn pursued their careers in New York. While all these artists found they had to confront the spectre of the new American painting, indeed, fashion themselves toward it, it was rarely as simple as merely following Abstract Expressionism. This paper establishes the continuing importance of European art on the generation practising during the 1950s, specifically the lasting symbolic influence of the painting of Hans Hofmann and Piet Mondrian as two poles in a spectrum defining painting's way forward. Furthermore, it will re-establish a short-lived but important movement in late-1950s New York of geometric abstraction as an antidote to gestural styles, for which artists and curators looked to European movements like constructivism and concrete art for its explanation. 3. Ines Vallejo Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain Esteban Vicente: A Spaniard in New York This paper will be delivered in Spanish. Notes in English will be available. Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) was a young Spanish artist who in order to flee the Spanish Civil War decided to migrate to North America. Later, as one who had been converted into an artist of the Americas, he would return to Spain looking for 'his roots' as a consequence of his first exhibition in the country of his origin since 1934. His artistic Odyssey commenced at the beginning of the 1940s when he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. His first artworks, both aesthetically and formally, directly linked up with the sensibility of the so-called 'Generation of 1927', of which Federico Garcia Lorca was one of the most outstanding representatives. In 1929 Vicente went to Paris, but in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War exploded on the scene anew in Madrid, he took the advice of friends and relocated to New York. Vicente arrived in the US with a provincial manner of painting, and by the 1940s embarked on a period of experimentation since he felt his painting had not achieved the level to which he aspired. In 1950, Vicente was selected, together with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, for the 'New Talents' show at the Kootz Gallery. The change in his work was enormous at that point. Vicente arrived at painting through a process of elimination, by abandoning drawing in order to concentrate on colour, since what he sought could be illuminated only through the interactions of colour. Beginning in the 1940s, he enjoyed the friendship of artists in the New York School and exhibited with them. In 1951 he participated in the '9th Street Exhibition', then in 1969 he was rechristened an 'American artist' when he was included in the exhibition 'The New American Painting and Sculpture'. 4. Genoveva Tusell Garcia Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, UNED, Spain The Internationalization of Spanish Abstract Art: The Interchange of Exhibitions between Spain and the USA (1950-1964) This paper will be delivered in Spanish. Notes in English will be available. At the start of the 1950s, the Franco regime began to look for ways to establish a place for itself on the international art scene - one that would allow itself to break out of the isolation to which it had surrendered since the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. There began to appear the first modest gestures of official acceptance for vanguard art that would subsequently lead to the organisation of exhibitions that focused little by little within Spain on the art that had become well known on the international level outside it. Through the 1955 show of abstract prints entitled 'The Modern Art of the United States', this art finally became known in Madrid and Barcelona for the first time. Three years later, in 1958, another show was put on at the small Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporaneo in Madrid, 'The New American Painting', which consisted of a selection of works from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Revealingly, this exhibition coincided with the moment of major ascendancy of Spanish informalismo thanks to the successes it secured at the 1958 Venice Biennial. After enduring years of neglect and indifference when officially representing the country internationally, Spanish art in the national pavilion suddenly won international critical acclaim as the best art at the Biennial. The cultural policies that the Franco Regime started to implement successfully outside the country reached a culminating point in 1960 with the simultaneous exhibition in New York of two exhibitions of Spanish informalismo: 'Before Picasso, After Miro', at the Guggenheim Museum and 'New Spanish Painting and Sculpture' at the Museum of Modern Art. 5. Yolanda Romero Centro Cultural Jose Guerrero, Spain Jose Guerrero, An Artist without Frontiers This paper will be delivered in Spanish. Notes in English will be available. In 1949, Jose Guerrero arrived in New York in a ship loaded with European emigres. He said later: 'When the ship approached New York there was a fog that veiled everything and then I was able to see the skyscrapers suddenly appearing, which caused considerable fear in me. I thought to myself: How would I be audacious enough to accomplish anything in such a powerful place as this?' But, it would be precisely in this very city that Guerrero, a person of humble origins from Grenada whose artistic formation as a painter occurred in Madrid during the 1940s and in Europe during the post-war years, encountered the necessary ambience for modifying his way of grasping artistic practice and thus of converting himself into a notable painter within the New York School. A Spaniard in America and an American in Spain, Guerrero produced his strongest paintings by fusing the two cultures on which his work was based into an inseparable formal union. If the US gave him the license, the scale, and the requisite dynamism to produce. Spam provided him with the formal values, colorful palette, and thematic concerns to paint. Nor can we overlook the significant legacy that Guerrero subsequently had on Spanish painting of the 1980s. For many critics and artists at that moment Jose ART AND CULTURE OF THE OTHER AMERICAS Guerrero was an exemplary figure of modernity owing to his vital attitude and matching artworks. The Latin-American Left and Avant-garde Art, or Jose Carlos Mariategui and Unorthodox Socialism David Craven University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA Jose Carlos Mariategui (1894-1930) of Peru was one of the most original thinkers from Latin America in the entire 20th century. Significantly, he is often called the 'Latin American counterpart to Gramsci' because of the way that he analyzed art and culture in relation to uneven development. His unorthodox use of classical Marxism caused him to write with striking subtlety about avant-garde art from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. A key forum for his analysis of early modernism was his journal Amauta' (1926-1930). While Mariategui has often been hailed in political theory for his resourceful look at the role of the popular classes in a 'war of positions' against hegemonic forces and sometimes praised in literary theory for his nuanced examination of contemporary literature, he has been almost ignored in Art History. This is the case despite his active support for the 'Mexican Mural Renaissance' during the 1920s and notwithstanding his notable impact on cultural policy immediately following both the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979. Our session will explore the rich yet overlooked contribution of Mariategui to a critical engagement with Latin American and European art. 1. Aimes McGuiness University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA The Panamanian Origins of 'Latin America' In our exploration of race and nation within what we now call Latin America, latter-day scholars would do well to recall how 'America Latina' as a spatial category has itself been racialised, beginning with its inception in 1850s. Recent scholarship on Pan-Latinism in the 1850s has made it increasingly clear how early advocates of Pan-Latin politics were active participants in contemporary debates over race and politics, rather than the passive recipients of a terminology invented by European intellectuals. As Torres Cacideo and Arosemena hoisted the banner of a united Latin America, they did not simply mimic ideas emanating from Europe. They participated in their very formation in public speeches, newsprint, and other venues. Arosemena's call for 'Latin American' unity in Bogota in July 1856 suggests that we must rethink the chronology and the geography of Pan-Latinism in the 1850s yet again. Rather than the invention of any single individual or any single place, the creation of 'America Latina' is perhaps better understood as the product of a more complex struggle over questions of sovereignty, race, and empire in the 1850s. This was a struggle with multiple fronts, ranging from the battlefields of central Americas and the salons of Paris to the pages of Bogatano newspapers. The importance of Justo Arosemena as an 'americanista', or as an advocate of Latin American unity, has been touched upon many times by Don Justos' numerous biographers. But the role that Arosomena played in the creation and diffusion of the very concept of 'America Latina' in the mid 1850s has gone relatively unappreciated. Indeed, many historians continue to assume that the notion of a specifically 'Latin' America did not gain widespread currency until the 1860s, in the context of Napoleon Ill's intervention in Mexico. 2. Raul Quint anilla art critic/editor of ArteFacto', Nicaragua Mariategui's Influence on Nicaragua's Art since 1979 Since 1979, few other modern thinkers influenced the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 more than did Jose Carlos Mariategui. Moreover, that influence has outlasted the Sandanistas' impressive decade in power. Since 1990, Mariategui has continued to influence progressive artists who have critically engaged with the neo-liberal policies instituted by the post-revolutionary administrations allied to US interests in the area. This paper will deal with the way that Mariategui's conception of uneven historical development still influences the artistic practice of such leading Nicaraguans as those linked to ArteFacto, Central America's main art journal. 3. Sergio Rivera-Ay ala Wayne State University, USA Marcos, or the Mariateguist Gospel According to Enrique Krauze When the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rebellion began in the state of Chiapas in January 1994, the Salinas de Gortari administration as well as most of the Mexican media tried to discredit it. Specifically, they attempted to portray the Zapatistas as a guerrilla movement sorely out-of-step in an era in which modernity -modernidad - was linked to the idea of democratic process and, more importantly, to the market economy of neo-liberal ideology. Within the official discourse, the Zapatista leadership was either referred to as a group of foreigners or said to be supported by a foreign state, particularly Cuba. One twist of this view was Mexican historian Enrique Krauze who proposed that the popular ideology behind Subcomandante Marcos, the EZLN leader, is linked to the Peruvian intellectual Jose Carlos ao ABSTRACTS Mariategui. To support this argument, Krauze makes an analogy between Peru and Chiapas in part by underlying the sociopolitical and historic similarities of the Andean country and the Mexican State. Krauze's view of Peruvian writers makes Mariategui look like a far left ideologue, almost fundamentalist. With this in mind he is not only disparaging Mariategui's social thought but also that of Marcos. The present paper will show the discursive strategies used by Enrique Krauze to establish a link between Mariategui and Marcos as he seeks to portray the latter as an obselete far left ideologue. 4. Barbara McCloskey University of Pittsburgh, USA The Face of Socialism: George Grosz and Jose Carlos Mariategui's 'Amauta' This paper considers the relationship between George Grosz, Communist Party artist and Weimar Germany's most notorious satiric illustrator, and Jose Carlos Mariategui in the 1920s. The political incisiveness of Grosz's works, which characteristically included caustic images of fleshy, scarred German bourgeois types, landed him in court on three separate occasions in the 1920s on charges of insulting the military, obscenity, and blasphemy, respectively. Given the cultural and political specificity of Grosz's work, it is surprising that Mariategui chose to feature essays on the artist and frequent reproductions of his art in his radical Peruvian journal Amauta. This paper explores their connection, including Mariategui's early essay on Grosz as well as Grosz's written contribution to Amauta and the function of his illustrations within the journal's overall programme. An analysis of their collaboration not only expands our historical understanding of Grosz's art but also illuminates the contours of Mariategui's aesthetic and political thought. Mariategui's interpretations of Grosz's work reveal certain affinities with Lukacs, Trotsky, and Sorel on aesthetics. His use of Grosz's art in Amauta also highlights the question of embodiment in Mariategui's politics and the specific 'face' he gave to socialism and the idiosyncratic Marxism for which he became recognized. 5. Petra Barreras, University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico Nueva York: Puerto Rico's Largest City and Art Capital Puerto Rico, the easternmost of the Greater Antilles, 100 miles long by 35 miles wide, has generated a disproportionate amount of powerful visual expressions since the 1950s. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the island's colonial relationship with Spain first and then with the United States since 1898, has inhibited the development of its socio­economic, political, and governmental structures. While the repression in these areas has been brutal at times, cultural production, unattended, has more room to grow, on occasion even supported by the colonial governments. In the 1960s and 1970s, the migration of close to one million Puerto Ricans (one third of the island's population), to the New York area create the breeding ground for new artistic trends to develop. The 'Nuyoricans' took advantage of the resources in the city that had become the art capital of the world; they also benefited from the Afro-American civil rights fight, and from the 'back to the roots' movement it generated. Four Puerto Rican visual artists living in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago have attained critical recognition since the 1980s with work that explores a 'minor' migrant culture: Rafael Ferrer, Juan Sanchez, Arnaldo Roche, and Pepon Osorio. 6. Nathan E . Bodoff, University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico Interchange and Isolation: Distance and Intimacy with the Metropolis in Puerto Rican Art There is a great deal of tension orbiting the juncture or disjuncture between national, regional, and global. In cultural terms these notions are often extraordinarily charged. Puerto Rico's unique status as an unincorporated territory of the United States has fomented an especially strong desire to project and protect a fully autonomous culture. Yet this curious relationship is one of the elements that has formed a rich artistic culture in Puerto Rico. This intimacy with New York can be seen as effecting the artistic environment from the beginning of the past century, but I will focus on two artists from the Generation de los cinquenta: Jack Delano and Rafael Tufino. Their generation most directly addresses art to social and educational issues. Jack Delano, an American, and Rafael Tufino, born in New York, were key figures in developing Puerto Rican art; a dialogue with ideas from the metropolis is essential to their work. The occasional immigration of artists to the island and a flow of local artists to and from New York has created the mixture of isolation and cosmopolitanism that allows distinct ideas to flourish. I will present my own work as a recent example in this continuum. Across the Great Divide, or Trumped by the Race Card: Contemporary Native American Art and Mainstream Discourse Greta Jennings Murphy University of Wisconsin at Eau-Claire, USA This session begins with the premise that contemporary Native American art suffers from a lack of rigorous criticism. The work of many of today's Native artists can be rather insular, and this insularity often acts as a barrier to sustained critical inquiry from those who view the art as racial products rather than artistic ones. The result is that even artists as universally recognised and respected as Jimmie ART AND CULTURE OF THE OTHER AMERICAS Durham tend to have their work discussed in vague cultural or colonial terms rather than from diffuse art-historical and critical perspectives. The purpose of this session is to challenge these monologie readings and to propose ways by which contemporary Indian art can be brought into the fold without being denuded of its cultural specificity. 1. Greta Jennings Murphy Spurious Issues: Self-Representation and Other Subversive Acts in Jim mi e Durham's Portraits Legitimized by the rhetoric of authenticity applied without regard to any criteria outside that of Indian blood-quantum, the contemporary Native American art world revealed a disturbing side with the passing of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990. This federal law, initiated and sponsored by a coalition of Native American artists and members of the United States Congress, requires anyone representing his or her self as an American Indian artist to provide legal proof of tribal membership. Fair enough, on the surface, but tribal memberships, the criteria of which are established by the tribes themselves, are based almost exclusively on degree of Indian blood; a vestige of nineteenth-century eugenics that thrives unabashedly as a preoccupation with phenotype and 'Indian blood-quantum'. The law leaves so-called 'mixed-blood' Indian artists who either cannot document their genetic history, or simply refuse to do so, suspect and quintessential^ other. Jimmie Durham was the first significant casualty of this law. Unwilling to engage in what he believed was a racist enrolment system, Durham refused to document his blood-quantum or to publicly enter the debate. However, I will argue, Durham does address his liminal position as a mixed-blood outsider through his sculpted portraits. These include, among others, the historical figures La Malinche and Pocahontas, Shakespeare's not-so-noble Caliban, and Durham's own Self-Portrait. 2. Adrianne A. Santina University of North Texas, USA Negotiating Ethnic and National Identity: Patriotic Signifiers in Native American Art As the primary signifier of the United States, the American flag appears unexpectedly in art works made by Native North Americans. The continued use of the flag and other signifiers of the US in Native art from the nineteenth century onwards indicates an ongoing artistic examination of the implications of being an ethnic minority in America. From works by artists such as Fritz Scholder, Bob Haozous, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, to Lakota beadwork and Navajo weaving by unknown artists, the flag and other signifiers of the US are indexical signs of the ambivalence Native Americans may feel regarding their plural identity as Natives and Americans. Using a semiological approach, this essay examines the means by which nationalistic signifiers assume polyvalency and accommodate political and national contradictions. Curiously, a canonical artist like Jasper Johns claims that his use of the American flag is simply a formal exercise unrelated to the concept of the United States. However, could a Native artist make a similar claim when using the same icon? Do the contingencies of identity prohibit Natives from using icons of nationality in a manner that undercuts their accepted meanings? Is the image of the flag itself so laden with intertextual significance that it always already signifies the United States? Despite the paucity of critical approaches to Native American art, interpretation of nationalistic signs by Native artists necessitates a semiological methodology. 3. Lara M. Evans University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA Luiseno Performance Artist James Luna: Language, the Dialogic, and Performance Bakhtin's identification of language as dialogic might be useful in discussing the work of Luiseho performance artist James Luna. Discussion of his performances as liminal zones might also be productive. I can use theory to identify the space Luna is occupying/engaging as a liminal space, a border zone and to characterize his communication as dialogical or multi-vocal, rather than monological. I can say his work is postmodern and post-colonial and that helps to categorize his work, and indeed, would tell some people all they think they need to know about his work. Other approaches I could take might focus on identity issues, specifically, the formation, and representation of 'Indian' identity. While all these approaches might produce interesting observations regarding Luna's performance art, there is something unsatisfactory about them. In my efforts to analyze his work, I find that the application of existing theory, even pulling from multiple disciplines, tends to obscure the things I find most interesting in his work. Somehow, the theories make certain aspects of his work invisible. These theories turn my attention to the issues of interest to non-Native theorists. What are the issues of interest to Luna's Native audiences? How can I go beyond categorizing Luna's performance according to the existing theory? Luna attracts diverse audiences for his performances. Luna's dialogic approach results in multiple, simultaneous interpretations for his audiences. What are the varied interpretations of a performance for his audiences? I will examine these issues using two performances: Petroglyphs in Motion and Take a Picture with a Real Indian. 4. Discussion Period. Cultures of Contemporary Art Section Convenor: Fiona Candlin Birkbeck College, University of London and British Museum, England The Cultures of Contemporary Art programme critically analyzes the modes of discourse that have been privileged within art history, and how those cultures are institutionally maintained. Race, Culture, and Representation considers how artists of different races have inequitable levels of access to the resources of other cultures. These inequities are often institutionally embedded through patterns of acquisition and display which, in turn, Collecting the Colony aims at tracing through a wide range of colonial encounters. Questions of power within an institutional context are also central to both Matters of Style which critically analyzes the inclusions and exclusions of art writing in an educational context and to Computer Arts, the Internet, and Power which examines the intersections of corporate and military influence, ICT, globalization, and art. In contrast. Political Art Now examines art that explicitly addresses political issues to ask, among other things, whether or not it is simply a stylish reworking of a conventional artistic genre. Other sessions examine forms of discourse and practice that have been necessarily peripheral to conventional art history. Matters of Science investigates new paradigms of matter in the natural sciences and their consequences for models of embodiment, materiality, and aesthetics, while Smelling, Hearing, Tasting, and Touching Art discusses the implications of art that utilizes the non-visual senses for an understanding of aesthetics, knowledge, and experience. CULTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART Race, Culture, and Representation Rasheed Araeen. artist/writer, England The question of race has been fundamental to colonialism. Race was used to maintain a separation of coloniser and colonized which in turn enabled 'backwardness' to be attributed to the 'inferiority' of these races, and for the connection between races and cultures to be eternally fixed. The colonized could not rise above the specificity of their cultures to speak with ideas that addressed the whole of humanity. In contrast, European artists explored indigenous cultures, their work apparently transforming the 'primitive' into an expression of modern consciousness. The living other, however, remained persistently outside this modern consciousness. Post-colonial theories of difference discuss 'in-between space', a space defined by the enunciation of the cultural difference of the 'other'. This only differs from nineteenth-century racial theories in that the race or the culture of the 'other' is now valorised and celebrated in the name of cultural diversity. The freedom that allowed artists like Picasso to go beyond the exhausted limits of European visual culture is thus refused to the contemporary 'other' who must still represent him/herself through his or her race or cultural difference. 1. Lize van Robbroeck University of Stellenbosch, South Africa Writing White on Black: The Construction of Race and Identity in 19th and 20th Century South African Art Writing The central premise of this paper is that an appropriate and totalizing discourse of modernity underlies most art historical, art critical, and anthropological writings dealing with 'black' art production in South Africa. It will be postulated that a modernist obsession with 'progress', 'science', 'rational/empirical enquiry', 'civilization', and 'race' found overt expression in the practice of colonialism and that colonial perceptions of 'black' art and material culture informed, and continues to inform, academic discourse in this field. I will look at a selection of texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explore the various theories of race, civilization, culture, and subjectivity that informed 'white' art writing on 'black' artistic production. I will demonstrate that, despite various shifts and transformations that occurred in accordance with historical events and changing intellectual and political contexts, these texts share common ontological grounds. I will explore the extent to which colonialist preconceptions continued to inform art writing in Apartheid South Africa. It will be postulated, inter alia, that the invention of an essential 'black' cultural identity in these writings constitutes an instance of 'Othering' that assists the reification of 'white' cultural identity as rational, individualistic, creative, benevolent, and supreme. 2 Katherina Homickova Central European University, Hungary The Most German Eye: Discussion over Rembrandt in Weimar Germany Bode's publication on Rembrandt was perceived as one of the most influential studies on Rembrandt's art. By claiming that Rembrandt's art is purely Germanic and 'an offspring of a purely German stem', he introduced a particular type of rhetoric using terms, such as 'German volkisch art' and 'Germanness'. However, he acknowledges him being Dutch too. This seems to suggest that Bode viewed Germanness in abstract sense and as a way of self-expression regardless of the artist's nationality. Consequently, scholars with conservative-nationalist orientation tried to explain Rembrandt's interest in Jews as interest in the 'other' whereas others argued for his interest in the use of artistic means to express the models' identity. When the Nazis came to power, the 'Rembrandt battle' entered its final stage in the polemic, in which leading Nazi art historian Wilhelm Pinder questioned the appropriation of Rembrandt as the most German artist. In 1944, Dutch collaborators with the Nazi regime brought the Rembrandt case to a sad finale in an unsuccessful attempt to promote a national Rembrandt Day. By then it was too late for recovering the idea of Rembrandt's Germanness, which was long time deserted by both German art historians and designers of Nazi cultural policy. 3. Jacqueline Francis, The Center for Afro-American and African Studies, USA Gone Nationalist: Black US and English Artists in the Long 1960s and 1980s The path to black American cultural nationalist art of the late 1960s and early 1970s has not been hard to map. Trained African-American artists dared a white-dominated establishment with blunt representations of anti-racist politics and of personal trauma and rage. The best of these artists developed new practices and vocabularies, laying down a 'black aesthetic'. During those years, Afro-British artists also considered 'racial art', but the 1980s witnessed cultural and political alliances among artists of colour. These tenuous coalitions collapsed in the late 1980s and were supplanted by various patronage mechanisms meant to support legibly 'black' or 'Asian' art. Strong and complex painting was supplanted by less aggressive, single issue statements in mixed media and installation formats. This paper considers the intersections of the two black nationalisms and their respective consequences. 4. Daniel J. Rycroft University of Sussex, England Negotiating S her will's Santhals: Artisanality, Ethnicity, and Ideological Vision during the 1850s My paper debates the colonial visual representation of tribal India in the 1850s, and the consumption of such images in Britain via their narrativization in the Illustrated London News (ILN). I analyze the engravings of Captain Sherwill whose authorial presence, as El Company revenue surveyor and army ABSTRACTS officer in fhe Rajmahal Hills (eastern India) in the 1850s, produced two divergent paradigms of ethnicized 'Santhals'. The first, disseminated by the ILN in 1851, inscribes the discovery of Santhals and celebrates their usefulness in helping to tame and cultivate the Rajmahal Hills, and to build India's first railway. Sherwill's attention is drawn to Santhal artistry and commerciality. I analyze the consumption of this paradigm in the context of Britishness and the Great Exhibition, and the ILN's publication of other sketches by Sherwill which celebrate Indian artisanality (e.g. Bengali 'ivory­carvers'). The second schema, disseminated by the ILN in 1855-56, constitutes a counter-insurgency ideology as enacted by Sherwill in his viewing and suppression of the 'Santhal Insurrection' or hul of 1855. Visual representations of Santhal identity, morality, and material culture were dramatically transformed during this counter-insurgency, and were narrativized by the ILN vis-a-vis a loyal artisanality (e.g. Bengali 'cotton-weavers' at the Paris Universal Exhibition). 5. Vuyile Cameron Voyiya South African National Gallery, South Africa Julie L. McGee Bowdoin College, USA, and South African National Gallery, South Africa A South African 'Museum without Walls': Cape Town's In/visible Art Institutions For more than a decade the South African National Gallery and other Cape Town art institutions have committed themselves to institutional reconstruction and change processes that necessarily address the systemic racism, classism, colonialism, and imperialism of the professional art world. This reconstruction is often recounted as a sequence of events, related primarily to exhibitions. As such these visible and public responses have been and continue to be scrutinized, critiqued, documented, and theorized by art world professionals. Less visible but no less real is the institutionalized peripheral position of black art in Cape Town. Black art and its critical reception and history may not be perceived as a formal institution, but in large measure its marginalization is. Through the voices and histories of black artists in Cape Town, this paper examines this institutionalized arena, places it in the context of acknowledged institutions, and considers non-event-centred restructuring relevant to both. Issues of concern include the relevance of recognizable institutional changes to the many cultures of contemporary art in Cape Town, in particular, black art; change agents and agencies of change; sufficiency of restructuring generated by cultures of institutional control; and the hindrance of change by labels such as 'township art'. Political Art Now Dave Beech University of Wolverhampton, England This session will explore the resurgence of interest in politics within the art world in the last few years in terms of projects undertaken and theories relating to them. Political projects: is ambitious art being combined with radical political intentions, or does one compensate for the lack of the other? Are Michael Landy's 'Breakdown' and Jeremy Deller's 'Battle of Orgreave' an update of political art after Duchamp or a nostalgic spectacularization of a lost political reality? Have contemporary artists become too removed from political activism to have any chance of seriously engaging in political intervention? Is the 'Art For All?' book a sign of an upsurge in political consciousness for contemporary art or a measure of its containment by administration? Were artists right to call for the withdrawal from Austria in protest at the politics of Otto Miihl? Political theories: Are the competing theories for the politics of contemporary art compatible with the politics of the art itself? Are theorists more political than the artists they promote? Is Julian Stallabrass' book 'High Art Lite' and Simon Ford and Anthony Davies's theory of the 'Culturepreneur' a significant contribution to the analysis of the cultural politics in the 21st century, or does it rethink the role of the artist in terms derived from defeat? Is today's political art a resurgence of genuine political activity, or a stylish reworking of a conventional artistic genre? 1. Patricia Bickers Editor of Art Monthly' and University of Westminster, England Politics / Smolitics What is political art? Is it different from politically engaged art? Was one once called political art with a small 'p' and the other, presumably, political art with a big 'P'? Can political art be effective and if so, is the ultimate definition of political art therefore a retrospective one? Is 'success' easier to gauge in the case of single issues such as AIDS awareness (e.g. ACT UP), or the representation of women in the art world such as the Guerrilla Girls, rather than, say, Hans Haacke's twin agenda to insert politics into art into the museum and museum politics in art? In an age when society seems to be ideologically adrift, has the power of celebrity replaced politics in art? (The power of 'A List' artists -Tracey or Damien - potentially to focus attention on specific political causes, for instance.) Does art that succeeds as politics fail as art? If the artist/citizen is to replace the Romantic/Modernist model of the autonomous artist, what are the parameters of social responsibility? Is art too hopelessly compromised by its symbiotic relationship with the establishment - by that 'umbilical cord of gold' - ever to be politically effective or is it, in the end, 'only art'? CULTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART 2. Mark Hutchinson, artist, England Four Types of Art in Search of a Public: The Political Strategies of Public Art I will use a Bhaskarian four stage dialectic to investigate public art and its relation to the audience. The first moment is the simple positing of art in the public realm as statues on plinths, etc. The art is confident in its own identity and/or function and in a receptive and/or submissive audience. The second edge inverts this relationship by casting the artist as subservient to the audience, typified by the artist reaching out to the community and working according to the meanings and wishes of the members of that 'community'. The third level is a form of closure, whereby the artist brings a set of knowledges to bear on art's public situation. This is what is known as site-specific work. The fourth dimension is to open up the assumptions underlying the first three stages of the dialectic. What control does the artist have over the meaning of his or her work in an overdetermined and open social system? What if the audience is not homogenized but structured, differentiated, and contradictory (including an audience of one person)? What if the meanings of public art are socially, culturally, and historically determined and radically up for grabs at the same time? 3. J J Charles worth University ofWestminster, England Twin Towers: The Spectacular Invisibility of Art and Politics Contemporary art in the UK has renovated awareness of the political implication of artistic practice, both in the content of the work, and in critical discussions on the changing institutional determinations governing artistic production. Changes in public policy have accelerated the growth of artistic practice explicitly directed towards social contexts, whilst a new range of political activism, defined by its antagonism to post-cold-war global capitalism, has emerged. This convergence of 'artistic' and 'political' practice recalls earlier periods of avant-garde praxis. The current combination however occurs within a profoundly changed social and political reality. The themes that dominate supposedly radical political discussion tend towards the pessimistic restraint of human intervention in all spheres of human life, from science and the environment, through economics, to social and intellectual liberty. Concurrently with such negative developments, previously marginal artistic practice and discourse has moved to the mainstream, this shift reflecting the consensus culture rather than an effective progressive or 'avant-garde' repositioning of art in society. Whist compensating for an absent progressive democratic process or project, contemporary art dissimulates the moribund reality of progressive culture, through the denigration of 'elitist' cultural discourse and a prioritization of social integration above artistic liberty and insight. 4. Jonathan Vickery University of Warwick, England Art Without Administration: Art Radicalism and Critique after the Neo-Avant-Garde Are the BANK artists right? Have even the most experimental' artists in contemporary Britain (and by implication the West as a whole) become mired in a bureaucratic culture industry whose objectives are antithetical to art itself? Have even the most radical forms of 'institutional critique' become absorbed into the art institutions' own programme of self-reflection and self­aggrandisement? Is the answer a collective exodus of young artists from the established institutional mechanisms of art's promotion, exhibition, and dissemination? This paper will question whether this is both practically feasible and politically advantageous, and attempt to outline what possible concepts of 'radical art' are left after the era of the Neo-avant-garde. If 'radical' art still exists does it nevertheless need to preserve a relative 'autonomy' from the realms of power and ideology and thus preclude itself from direct political partisanship and activism? I will suggest that much of what stands as 'political' art is political only by theme or association: political art needs a radical re-think of its own concept of autonomy - and the emerging networks of anti-globalization activists (along with 'globalization theory') might provide some ideas. 5. Mikkel Bolt Rasmus sen Aarhus University, Denmark Exodus or Intervention? From I.S. and Autonomia to Contemporary Art In this presentation I will consider the troubled relationship between art and politics in the Internationale situationniste and the Italian Autonomia movement, in which Toni Negri played a huge role. At a moment in which more and more contemporary art refers to and tries to enact a kind of radical politics it is of importance to analyze the abandonment of art in favour of radical action undertaken by the situationists and the split in the Autonomia movement between a more restricted 'political' wing and a 'creative-artistic' wing. The juxtaposition between the situationist and autonomist 'solution' might make it possible to approach the use of politics by contemporary art and analyze the almost ]ubilatory return to the practices of 'political art' of the late 1950s and 1960s without simplifying the difficult relationship between art, aesthetics, and politics in a world characterized by a necessity to rethink citizenship and political community insofar as a global migration is advancing and undermining the nation- state and the trust in capital's self-reform. 6. Ben Fitton DeMontfort University, England Shifting Positions In what way does a practice that seeks to achieve some kind of currency risk being undermined by changes in the ABSTRACTS political and economic sphere? How might it be possible to maintain a position as an artist in the tace of a shifting and evasive political field? Is the maintenance of a fixed position a desirable, responsible, or necessary act? Is a shifting, adaptive position the most advantageous? To quote Sundance, 'Can I move? I'm better when I move.' Is it possible to maintain a shifting position in relation to a given situation? Shifting position is an established method of both attack and defence, confusing an opponent and forcing them to reveal their own position, but we are faced with a situation where corporations, governments, and terrorist organizations draw from the same theories of decentralization and adaptation. What place for an oppositional art in a field unified by its desire for change? Is opposition from the margins art's most valuable political function? Is it art's only available political function? What form can opposition take when other oppositional forces pose a far greater threat to the opposed? What are the chances of success - could it be argued that political art's aim is the maintenance of an oppositional position, not some kind of conversion or victory? Can art viably seek the realization of political ambitions? Does a potentially fake or impenetrable position make for more interesting or successful art? Is the threat of failure or fraud more interesting than the threat of political success? Smelling, Hearing, Tasting, and Touching Art Fiona Candlin Birkbeck College University of London and British Museum, England Major exhibitions such as Audible Light (2000) and Sonic Boom (2000) indicate the increasing interest in sound-based art, but there are also numerous art practices that involve hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting (multi-sensory art). For instance Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion's 'The Most Beautiful Thing' (1995) used perfumed cards, Rirkrit Tiravanija art installations have included food and drink for visitors, while Marina Abramovic's quartz sculptures are made to be touched. Like much conceptual art, artwork that utilizes the non­visual senses questions the assumed connections between art and vision, but it also raises wider questions for art history, aesthetics, and for institutional practice. In addition to discussing multi-sensory art in relation to current theories of embodiment, memory, perception, and cognition, this session will also consider the specific issues concerned with producing, exhibiting, conserving, documenting, and consuming art that is made to be touched, heard, tasted, or smelled. In particular, the session will ask to what extent does multi-sensory art re-figure different institutional spaces. 1. Leslie Hill and Helen Paris London, England Ontology of the Olfactory Here we will discuss the emotive impact of smell and its relationship to live performance in reference to research we are currently undertaking for a project 'On the Scent'. Funded by a Wellcome Science on Stage and Screen award 'On the Scent' is a live art installation which investigates the emotive and cognitive influences of smell, particularly how it acts as a trigger for memory and emotions. The project uses the forum of live performance/installation to investigate the potential of smell to trigger memories and emotions, and to discuss the largely unsuspected but nonetheless tremendous impact of the sense of smell on cognitive or 'reasoning' processes. Because this project takes the form of a live art performance/installation the audience are actively involved and participate in the smell investigation. It is the aim of the project that the audience have increased awareness of the connection between smell and memory. We are collaborating with olfactory scientist Dr Upinder Bhalla, from Bangalore, India, and this paper will also discuss the dynamics of art/science/artist/scientist collaborations. 2. Deborah Cherry University of Sussex, England She Loved to Breathe - Pure Silence In Zarina Bhimiji's 'She Loved to Breathe - Pure Silence', photographic panels were suspended above scattered spices. My paper will consider a range of concerns prompted by this work: issues of spatiality and history engaged by the contrasts between its installation in a gallery and its present place in the photographic collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the problems of the conservation and archiving of sensory art works; the conjunctions and disjunctions of sensory incitations in installations, between vision and smell as well as to the body; the questions of voice and aurality for a piece whose title refers to breathing and to silence. At issue will be the complex relations between a poetics of the senses and a politics that addresses the entangling of racial and sexual discrimination in policies of immigration, questions of migration and diaspora, and the making of identities. 3. Clara Ursitti Glasgow School of Art. Scotland The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly As an artist I am literally led by the nose in that my practice over the past nine years prioritizes the sense of smell, and not the visual. I work with biochemist Dr George Dodd, father of electronic nose technology, to create portraits in scent which are electronically dispersed in the gallery. Although I sometimes employ photography, performance, and video in my work, the primary thrust both conceptually and physically, CULTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART is the sense of smell. I am interested in the animalistic side of human nature, and what is considered taboo or uncivilized. Unlike sight, where we can name and identify colours, there is no language for smell. Consequently we often speak in crude dichotomies of good and bad, suggesting both an aesthetic and social judgement. Here I will explore this dichotomy and what it excludes. The focus of my practice on the sense of smell has proved most challenging when exhibiting in group shows as it is difficult to contain a smell. In this paper I will present my work in relation to other artists who are working similarly and in the context of some of the issues concerning exhibiting, promoting, and archiving olfactory work. 4. David Cunningham University of Westminster, England Sounds in the Gallery: Aesthetics, Sensibility, and the New Spaces of Art This paper seeks to investigate critically the emergence of 'sound art' as a particular cultural form. The paper argues that the emergence of sound art has to be understood in the context of the shift from the specific (modernist) art of painting to a form of 'generic' art in 1960s Conceptualism, insofar as the insistence on going beyond any purely 'visual' definition of art has meant that sound has come to have as much claim to legitimacy as 'art' as any visual form does. One result of this shift is that it strengthens the extent to which the ontological space of art can no longer be restricted to the literal space of the gallery. While, however, such a move beyond the gallery had, in its earlier manifestations, a strongly Utopian dimension - seeking a transgression of the institution which might close the gap between art and everyday life - its prevailing contemporary 'effect', so this paper argues, is in fact a re­confirmation of this gap, as the assignment of art status to other forms and practices requires their insertion within a recreated ontological space of art which transfigures and colonizes the 'everyday' spaces that it then occupies. In the case of sound art, it is therefore argued that there is a need for a properly critical consideration of what happens when sound is brought within this space of art, and, in particular, how this relates to its alternate situating within the 'space' of music as a specific' art form. 5. Andrew Stooke Sherborne School, England Suspended Expectations: On Performance with Audience Recent sonic works by Matsubara Sachiko, Otomo Yoshihide, and Tosimanj Nakamura have pared apart the relationship of performers with the devices of performance. We thought of the basic concept and composition together. We still don't know what Filament is but it is something from us. Claims made about performances by these sound artists have emphasized the attentive and motionless audience. Through an approach to Bion's early work on hallucination I argue that such performances dramatize a louche relation between artist and audience. The sonic and the spectacular content of the performance are displaced; how may the stillness and quietness of the audience be understood? Recognition of the mechanism at work may be found in a reading of Bion's account of the patient suffering from hallucinations, 'as if his stream of associations were by way of being a prolonged evacuation'. The audience appears to be responsible for completing the work but they are manipulated by the performers, who, like Bion's analysand, dump part objects away from themselves in the performance space. In other current works of visual art the spectator is similarly held in an eroticized pose orchestrated by the artist. 6. Discussion Period. More Than Just a Matter of Style ­On the Practices of Writing on Art Kerstin Mey Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, Scotland Ken Neil The Robert Gordon University, Scotland Since the onset of modernism, the understanding of art has been increasingly marked by its need for commentary. Visual works - though they mean more than words may ever express - are not necessarily self-evident or self-revelatory. Their understanding depends more often than not on the written word, on the written discourse as context. Against the perceived 'silence of the visual works' the need for analysis and interpretation has been growing incessantly. What was once established as a 'complementary phenomenon' has become an integral part of contemporary art: the writing about art. The forms and functions of the written discourses on art are essentially determined by the 'institutional' frameworks in which they are embedded, and of course by society at large. We can observe a paradigm shift, not least in epistemological terms, from a text-based to an image-focused culture under the influence of the rapid development of new information and communication technologies. That has consequences for the ways we generate knowledge, how we communicate information and exchange ideas, and thus is not only reflected in the production of visual works but also concerns the discourses about art, including critical writing. 1. Carol Magee Dickinson College, USA Reading between the Lines at the National Museum of African Art, Washington DC This paper examines the role of the written word in the context of the educational role of the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA). I specifically look at the as ABSTRACTS publications for their permanent installations in terms of how the language represents both Africa - in descriptions of the objects and their indigenous meanings - and America - in the underlying attitudes and assumptions that frame these writings. I do so to understand how and what meanings about African cultures are constructed as well as the potential consequences for how this knowledge is received. NMAfA's mission statement highlights aesthetics as the primary means by which to understand African visual culture. I consider the implications of this approach in a post-structuralist intellectual climate that privileges the socio-historical contexts of art production particularly, and the political nature of the production of knowledge generally, over such formal approaches. In delving into the multiple layers of representational practices that occur in NMAfA's writing about art, I highlight the need for both more detailed and comprehensive presentations of Africa, its people and their art, and more nuanced understandings of how writings about African art make evident Americans' constructions of themselves in relation to those ideas and objects. 2. Kevin Henderson Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, Scotland Exhaustion and Disinterest The blason anatomique (at its most popular in France between 1536-1543) was a poetic form that took its subject (not the entirety of the feminine body, but one particular part of it) in a highly selective process of separation, whereby one part was abstracted from the totality of that body: it took the feminine body apart and scattered its fragments across the Renaissance imaginary. This poetic form, more I think than any other, vividly demonstrates the (political) will toward an accumulation of data; each poem consisting of a voyeuristic assault - on the feminine body - on a surface detail, and one intimately linked to the acquisition (creation) of a certain kind of totalizing knowledge (power) - one which excluded the reader at the very moment it uttered her name; the part assuming the status as a whole. This paper will look at similarities between this poetic form and certain 'ways of seeing' (writing about art) prevalent within art institutions today. It will specifically argue for a writing that is 'already exhausted', one that necessarily asks for a 'disinterested' reader. 3. Ken Neil Writing and Declaring in Contemporary Art: Literary Literalness This paper considers the strategy of some contemporary British artists of creating a tautology between the subject and the title of their work; a tautology that is achieved when the writing of the title of the work declares again the apparent subject of the work. The purpose of this consideration is, firstly, to examine the ways in which this 'strategy of writing' is used by the artist to close down 'conventional' interpretative potentialities between image and text. Specifically, this examination emphasises the literal/literary aspects of the work of Sarah Lucas. Reading this narrowing of interpretative possibility as a deliberate 'act' of ennui, this paper, secondly, speculates about the meaning of such 'tautological declaration' with reference to other instances of literal superficiality in post-war art. 4. Kerstin Mey The Gesture of Writing The paper considers the role of critical writing as an integral part of reflective practice, looking in particular at the framework of Higher Education and post-graduate research. By drawing on the phenomenological theory of Vilem Flusser. I shall discuss the epistemological potentials related to a number of different text formats such as essay and dissertation and creative writing. In the context of the 'pictorial turn' that marks contemporary culture, I will consider alternative ways in which critical analysis and reflective thinking can be exercised, articulated, and evaluated. 5. Katy MacLeod and Lin Holdridge University of Plymouth, England The Bole of Critical Writing on Art in Art Education Today This paper sets out to reveal critical writing that promotes a clear understanding of the production, constitution, and valorization of knowledge. It will demonstrate how pedagogic strategies which involve the scrutiny of critical writings and the production of the student's own high standard of critical practice, including writings, necessarily engender a transparency of value systems and the ways in which knowledge is validated. It will also demonstrate how students with a clear understanding of how value systems operate are empowered to engage in practices which actively contribute to culture, not in the passive sense of a reaffirmation of cultural norms, but in a critical sense of deflecting, refusing, and playing with them. The paper will outline pedagogic strategies which foster a high order of critical thinking and writing, and predict student understanding of the crucial relationship between art practices and cultural context. The paper will seek to elucidate how developing critical studies writing programmes that reveal the transparency of value systems is important to pedagogic integrity, an integrity which is particularly crucial to art education. 6. Ross Birrell Glasgow School of Art, Scotland Wanting to Be a Red Indian The self-reflexive, critical practice which is encouraged in the studios of Art Schools is also being supported in the form of critical writing required at degree level. The Extended Essay/Dissertation submitted at undergraduate level is modifying its format and assessment criteria alongside similar developments in postgraduate studies, with the emergence of the PhD by practice-based research. Drawing upon the models of experimental critical writing by writers and theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Leo Charney, Jacques Derrida, Matthew Goulish, and Peggy Phelan, this presentation seeks to explore contemporary modes of experimental critical writing and methods of supporting the development of experimental critical writing within the context of the required written submission at degree level at Art School. This does not simply effect decisions of format (Object, CD Rom), but of appropriate strategies of research supervision and assessment criteria. Looking at the critical writing practice of Francis McKee (curator and writer) and John Calcutt (writer and lecturer) - both of whom teach at undergraduate and postgraduate level at GSA - I will argue that Glasgow is a useful model in which to examine the impact of conceptualism on the practice/teaching of critical writing in what remains the studio-led environment of art school. Collecting; the Colony: Contemporary Thoughts on Imperial Histories Partha Mitter and Judith Green University of Sussex, England Collecting has been a central practice of colonialism: objects have been captured along with territory, works of art acquired along with information. Fragments of empire have been brought together in collections embodying colonial and imperial projects. This session seeks to expand understanding of the intersection of collecting and colonialism by bringing together scholars working on the many different aspects of this issue. 1. John Zarobell Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA The Global Landscape: Collecting Views for the Colonial Archive In 1839, an early enthusiast of daguerreotypes recruited adventuresome travellers to make pictures from around the globe to be assembled into a comprehensive collection. Noel Lerebours' Excursions Daguerriennes (1841-43) was the first visual archive of the world's sites and was composed of engravings taken directly from daguerreotypes. The ambition to collect views was not unprecedented, but the Excursions Daguemennes expanded the scale of such projects and the acquisition of views paralleled France's increasing colonial ambitions. I aim to demonstrate that the explosion of mechanically reproduced landscapes in the mid nineteenth century was linked to an emergent global consciousness among Europeans determined by new modes of visual apprehension. The idea of landscape, as perceived by a fixed, detached spectator, takes on distinct implications when applied on a world-wide scale and in the context of CULTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART expanding imperialism. The goal of making an exotic location apprehensible to a metropolitan public through the conventions of landscape not only introduced new vistas into the European imagination, but fixed the viewer's role as well. The new methods for representing and reproducing landscapes would have radical implications for both the production of space and the consumption of places, in the spheres of colonialism, geography, and tourism. 2. Rainer Buschmann Hawaii Pacific University, USA Manipulating the Salvage Paradigm: Ethnographic Collecting in German New Guinea Building upon recent scholarship on ethnographic collecting, my paper investigates how different players in the colonial arena understood and negotiated the practice of collecting indigenous material culture in German New Guinea. Following Germany's annexation of the north-eastern parts of New Guinea, German anthropologists promoted a coordinated salvage operation to obtain the last remnants of 'untainted' material culture. For this programme, anthropologists sought to enlist German residents in the colony. Colonists answered the call in great number, but used the salvage paradigm for their own purposes. In this sense, German trading companies indulged into the commercial possibilities of the salvage idea. Colonial officials for their part appropriated German ethnographic effort to gain detailed knowledge about the indigenous population. Last not least, indigenous peoples used the interest in material culture to negotiate their own roles in the emerging colonial society. The paper concludes that such manipulations of the salvage agenda had ultimately tremendous repercussions for anthropology's history. The different designs on the salvage paradigm forced German anthropologists to develop new methods focusing on the indigenous producers of artefacts rather than the objects themselves. 3. Boris Wastiau Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium Collecting, Selecting, and Displaying the Colonial Subject in Tervuren. 191 0 The paper I will present here derives from a broader research and curatorial project on 'Colonial visual culture and the ethnographic museum: The Museum of Belgian Congo in Tervuren, 1910-1940', which attempts to re-create and re­ present in a critical perspective some of the major displays of Congolese artefacts in what was then an instrument of Belgian colonial propaganda. The anthropological-historical perspective of this paper will aim at unravelling the rationale that presided over the selection, grouping, and display of Congolese artefacts in the first permanent galleries of the museum that was designed by French architect Girault by appointment to Leopold II. Using a variety of archival material, the objective will be to outline the visual strategies that were deployed to empower the curators' discourse: prestigious marble galleries, panoplies of weapons, sharp 30 ABSTRACTS classifications, and display of European-made sculptures of Africans. This research is the starting point of a contemporary curatorial project that hopes to re-create a number of those early displays. Among the challenges is the search for new visual and other communication strategies that will enable critical perspectives on the exhibition and bring the visitors to establish by themselves relationships with other contemporary issues in and around the museum. 4. Jude Hill University of London Royal Holloway, England Cultures and Networks of Collecting: Tracing the Lives of Henry Wellcome's Collection In this paper I examine the various ways in which the ongoing histories of the Wellcome collection have been, and still are embroiled with attempts to (re)collect and (re)present objects from 'the colonies'. Although little research has been conducted into Wellcome's collecting activities, on his death (1936), he had amassed approximately one million objects, three quarters being broadly classified, during its establishment, as 'ethnographic'. Diverse case studies are drawn upon to illustrate the types of collector networks Wellcome objects became entangled with, highlighting the different ways in which a variety of material cultures were acquired for the collection: commercial auction houses, the collection of objects by explorers, colonial officers and missionaries, exchange of objects with museums/institutions and the work of professional anthropologists. Through these examples, I demonstrate the contrasting relationships between colonialism(s) and particular cultures of collecting, impacting on the evolution and consumption of the collected objects. Over a number of years, much of the collection has been dispersed to over one hundred locations in the UK and overseas. I finish the paper by touching on the ways in which certain objects and their associations to colonialism have been 'reborn', 'reinvented' or indeed hidden, within some of these new contexts. 5. Susan F. Abasa Massey University, New Zealand Hot Property? Collecting Aboriginal Art in Australian Art Museums 1980-1995 This paper examines collecting trends of contemporary Aboriginal art in four leading Australian art museums 1980-1995. Aboriginal art became 'hot property' for these public collections and for the art market during that time. In 1982 Aboriginal Art comprised less than 0.4% of all contemporary Australian art acquisitions. By 1994, this increased to 28%. These four art museum collections represent nearly a thousand indigenous artists - over a quarter of Australian contemporary artists acquired in the last fifteen years. The paper analyzes reasons for growth in acquisitions and considers three questions: Why were Australian art museums slow to collect Aboriginal art? What prompted the boom? Is the art museum's interest in contemporary Aboriginal art at the vanguard of a revitalization in museum practices or, is it an appropriation CULTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART of success? The paper argues that Aboriginal art's place within the canon is achieved without disrupting the power structures within art museums. Furthermore, the canon cannot accommodate the complexities, nuances, and ambiguities of cultural difference except through appropriation and aesthetic reassignment into Western-based knowledge systems. Using Bourdieu's concepts of the cultural field and cultural capital, I suggest that instead of 'differencing the canon', Aboriginal art has been used to create a cultural commodity. 6. Kavita Singh Jawaharlal Nehru University, India Curzon's Collection of Indian Artefacts This paper traces the fortunes of the Curzon Collection ­a collection of artefacts brought back from India by Lord Curzon, and offered by him to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In doing so, the paper looks at an accretion of objects surrounding an important colonial figure; at the collection's role in memorializing the colonial career; at the commandeering of a national art institution in this memorializing process; and most interestingly, at the art institution's resistance to being so co-opted. Curzon was Viceroy of India from 1898-1905. Upon his return to England, he offered his collection of Indian 'things', lying unpacked in crates, to the V&A. The museum was at first enormously excited by this offer, but excitement turned to dismay when it most objects turned out to be bric-a-brac and personal memorabilia. Curzon was too powerful for the museum to displease, and the display, overseen by Curzon himself, celebrated his Vice-regal career, with the great Durbar of 1911 as its centrepiece. As Curzon's power declined however, the collection was increasingly marginalized until it was finally returned to his estate after his death. The story of the Curzon collection is full of ironic humour deriving from the clash of two models of collecting: that of the colonial potentate who wishes for a monument to his greatness, and that of the museum, a professional institution that wishes to fix the value of things by criteria of its own. Contemporary Art and Matters of Science Peggy Rawes Goldsmiths College University of London, England This session will consider issues in contemporary art practice and aesthetics that reflect new paradigms of matter that are produced in the contemporary natural sciences. The exhibition Force Fields (Hayward Gallery, 2000). and art works by Cornelia Parker ('Mass - Colder, Darker, Matter') Stelarc ('Zombie Cyborgs') the Chapman Brothers ('Chapman World'), or Thomas Griinfeld ('Misfits') suggest concepts of materiality in contemporary science. Sciences such as micro­ CULTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART biology, genetics, and theoretical physics produce concepts of matter which can be understood as a series of concrete and potential states, rather than an idealized and inert concept brought to life by the external principle of form. These radically altered states of matter therefore offer new structures through which to consider issues of identity, embodiment, and technology in the production and consumption of art. 1. Yvonne Scott Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Landscape Unbound: Science and the Redefinition of Landscape in Art This paper argues that science provides a valid basis for reinterpreting and redefining landscape as a spatial concept in contemporary art. While 'landscape' has been, traditionally, limited to what can be seen with the naked eye, its scale determined by the relationship of man to the environment, and its representation confined largely to either view or context, science has provided the means to challenge and, in particular, to extend the definition of landscape in art by revealing and disseminating, through contemporary media, the infinitesimal and the infinite dimensions of the matter of which landscape is ultimately comprised. In this context and with reference to the work of three Irish artists Fionnuala Ni Chiosain, Mark Francis, and Nicholas May, selected existing aesthetic and philosophical theories of landscape imagery are reconsidered. These artists have variously interpreted the microscopic and telescopic in vistas, intriguingly ambiguous in scale, and their work is commonly described in language generally associated with landscape and its structures (e.g. motorways, regions, territories, or inhabitants). In the light of their imagery, the paper explores the extent to which the deconstruction of the landscape, by science, promotes its re-evaluation and cultural repositioning. 2. Esther Leslie Birkbeck College University of London, England Synthetix When Alexander Baumgarten coined the term Aesthetics (1750-1758), he argued - against Newton - that the eye and the senses play an active role in perception. He drew this from the Greek term aisthetos (perceivable), and also the term aistheticos (capable of perception). This notion is taken up in the natural philosophical tradition of early German chemistry, which refuses a distinction between science and art. For instance. F. Runge, inventor of the first synthetic dye, bases his scientific method on the notion that objects 'see', and possess a drive within themselves. His book of experiments with coloured solutions dramatises this 'will to self-formation'. Influenced by Romantic natural science ('everything which is real thinks') and Hegelian philosophy (the dialectic of actuality and possibility), Goethe wrote: 'Those natures which...quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids, which although they are most usually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, must decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance.' I examine the relationship between this active concept of matter and emergent ideas of synthesis and plasticity in chemistry and theory (i.e. Marx's 'cytoblastic' commodity). These ideas appear in later art practice (e.g. in Baumeister), and also in contemporary collaborations. 3. Rory Hamilton and Jon Rogers Royal College of Art, England Art and Visual Perception: Ail Exploration through Science and Art How does our mind perceive the world around us? The formal study of the mind raises large questions which are tackled very differently in the realms of science and art. Science attempt to objectify this study, and to reduce the scope of its questions to ever smaller areas of enquiry. The goal of art is more elusive, as is its nature. It allows for ambiguity, and even for irrationality. The senses become super-enhanced when 'experiencing' art. Science reduces while art expands our conscious selves. In this paper, a scientist and an artist will describe a working practice, broadly entitled 'Art and visual perception'. Particular attention is given to movement and perceived depth, using the scientific tools of Gestalt theory, and ecological theories of perception in relation to art practice and history, design, and new technologies. A dialogue between methodologies is set up and the nature of subject and object, viewer and work is questioned. The artworks function as experiments within themselves and upon the audience. The audience must question their perception of the work and how their minds perceive it. This provides a new way of juxtaposing science, art, theory, curation, and practice. 4. Suhail Malik Goldsmiths College University of London, England Digital Formalizations Recent developments in architectural practice have led to proposals of a bypassing of formal concerns in design processes in favour of productions determined by iterative and flux-based animation programmes. It is argued that producing shapes a fortiori, in part by following the unforeseeable development of turbulence in such flows, renders the notion and value of form (with all its Platonic resonances) obsolete. Though similarities can be found between these claims and those of process art in the late 1960s and 70s, the significant difference between the two is that the recent developments are digitally rather than materially constituted (not least for reasons of engineering). Material production is then determined and constituted otherwise than materially - if only because the standard form-matter couple no longer has the same bearing on production. However, it is by now clear that such shape generating devices have their own aesthetic which has influenced many contemporary artists, and does so 3a ABSTRACTS formally more than in any other way. This paper will then consider whether form can be so easily dispensed with from the ambitions of digital shape production. 5. Jennifer Way University of North Texas, USA Cybernetics and Cyborgification: John McHale's Telemaths During the Late 1950s John McHale, then associated with the Independent Group, figured emerging theories and popular culture representations of cybernetics in collage paintings called Telemaths. As the study of how machine, social, and biological systems behave, cybernetics offered McHale the material and conceptual means with which to demonstrate ways that an American consumer economy generated subjectivity, which he espied in mass media and popular culture, and encountered at Yale University, 1955-6. McHale treated his materials as both manifestation and allegory of American consumer cultures reification, really, cyborgification, of the body and its desires. With paint and magazine pages he generated a quality of surface in, on, and across which he and his colleagues gleaned analogs for new sociocultural identities. Cyborgification also indicates that materials constituting Telemaths behaved like the cybernetic processes and economic activities McHale claimed were spawning them. Certain techniques staged the cyborgs as effects of brain, economy, and machine communicating through signs of image and tactile-based networks motivated by output and feedback. Today, they should oblige historians of art and culture engaging cybernetics to revisit the gap CP. Snow identified between the sciences and humanities, a gap, Snow argued disingenuously, that precluded constructive dialogue. 6. Gavin Parkinson Courtauld Institute of Art, England 'Invisible, Thermal, Dynamic, Magnetic, Sonorous Revelations': Modern Physics and Surrealist Art and Theory, 1934-43 The epistemological questions raised by surrealist theory, psychoanalysis, and Relativity and quantum physics forced a debate in the early 1930s within French philosophy circles on the cultural and intellectual value of the irrational. Several figures on the fringes of surrealism, such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, and Gaston Bachelard contributed to this exchange. Some of them sought to foreground the similarities between the languages of dispersal and fragmentation that had animated both psychoanalysis and modern physics on the one hand, and vanguard painting on the other. These languages seemed set upon giving an image to the invisible forces directing (human) nature, whether describing the behaviour of the unconscious or that of the subatomic world. This paper positions surrealist artists within the same debate. It argues that in the late 1930s, the Chilean painter Matta sought to forge a pictorial language indebted to cartography, seeking a coalition of the inner and outer, microcosmic and macrocosmic. subjective and objective 'domains'. It also records how the Viennese painter and writer Wolfgang Paalen mobilized a knowledge of quantum physics to escape the static, ocular-centric image framed by the traditional genre of landscape painting, aiming to invoke the pattern unveiled by quantum physics as the rhythmic vibration, the very pulse of life. Computer Arts, the Internet, and Power Alan Schechner and Alessandro Imperato Savannah College of Art and Design, USA This session will consider a range of issues relating to the digital arts and power, such as the 'ideology of cyberspace', the institutional production, reception, and circulation of computer art, particularly in relation to the Internet as a site of exhibition and proliferation. Other issues that may be discussed include the power of institutions and corporations to shape the future of web art; does the 'Internet Gallery' constitute a newly emerging digital 'white cube' that continues to privilege and promote existing structures and processes of power and control? What relation does web art and the 'world wide' web have to mass access and privilege in the context of newly forming information classes, analogue and digital nations, internationalism, race, as well as gender politics? What are the manifest and potential effects of patronage via the corporate sphere on art and freedom of expression and how does this relate to previous Utopian dreams of the Internet as a site of democratic participation and communication? 1. Alessandro Imperato Net Art, the White Cube, and the 'World Wide Web' This paper will examine assumptions concerning the Internet as a site of exhibition and circulation of net art, and will question the myth of the Internet as a Utopian space able to transcend the access limitations and real politic of the artworld and its institutions. I will be considering the role of the art gallery as a temple for cultic objects, or the 'white cube', and as cultural gate-keeper. These issues will be related to Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and his concept of the 'aura'. Benjamin's essay has particular importance concerning issues in digital culture, originality, valuation, and curatorial selection, as can be seen in recent attempts by established art galleries to use the Internet as a forum for exhibition, such as the Whitney Museum of Modern Art as well as other art institutions. CULTURES OF CONTEMPORARY ART 2. Sarah Parsons York University, Canada Collective Sites for Remembering: Imagining Slavery in Virtual Space What are we to make of the fact that the memorializing and visualization of slavery in Internet exhibitions stands in stark contrast to the way slavery is usually addressed in site-specific institutions? In his recent study of visual representations of slavery, Marcus Wood levied a strong critique against the paucity and simplicity of British memorials to the history of slavery. Wood points to public memorials of sympathetic Britons like William Wilberforce and in the disturbing models and artefacts of the Transatlantic Slavery gallery of the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool. Slavery is a more tangible presence in American and African institutions, but Internet exhibitions seem to be unique in that they consist primarily of photographic portraits of former slaves. Alongside other sources of historical knowledge, these sites employ visual representations of slavery to interpret the history of colonialism for a contemporary public. Therefore, I am interested in considering the origins and implications of these exhibitions. How do particular images limit, shape, and focus our knowledge about slavery? In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy argued that the crucial historical relevance of slavery lies beyond national histories. How useful might it be to consider cyber space as constitutive of the 'Black Atlantic'? 3. Alan Schechner Packets of Resistance: Net .Art as Political Activism Discourse addressing the implications of computer technology tends either to extreme pessimism or Utopian optimism. Part of that utopianism has manifested itself in ideas that technological development will lead to social and political justice. This paper will address the ways in which ideologically specific net.artists are using the Internet as a tool for political art. How do we locate this work in an (art) historical context? What strategies have been developed by artists using the web? How successful have they been and, given both the rate of technological development and the increasing influence of corporate and institutional culture on the web, what may the future hold for net activism? By addressing contemporary practice and analyzing its successes and failures a clearer and more relevant picture of the role of technology can begin to emerge. 4. Salomi Voegelin Goldsmiths College University of London Fluidity and Fixing: Digital Obstacles or Immaterial Commodities? This paper examines art practice with respect to notions of 'Fluidity and Fixing' as they appear in current contentions of the network age. I am juxtaposing euphoric notions of network-fluidity, presented as a strategy for artistic practice to work against fixed normative values, with more critical views on the 'actual fluidity' of the network. The notion of web based work, as artistic dematerializations, constructing fluid 'obstacles' to the object based actuality of a 'real', objective, world, related to concurrent issues of representation and subjectivity is under consideration: Is the immaterial artwork on the net a 'fluid obstacle' to existing modes of production and perception challenging their aesthetic valuation and its ideological investment? Or is the material art object a better 'obstacle', challenging meaning based on fluid networks of power and control? The understanding here is that issues of materialization or dematerialization of the artwork on the net or in 'real' space are critically linked to issues of power, in as much as they are related to notions of a producing subjectivity and a collective sensitivity, and also, and more importantly maybe, in that such questions are linked to notions of control over the 'space' and 'knowledge' of production and perception. 5. John Byrne John Moores University, England Apocalypse Then: Cybersublime and the Work of Chris Cunningham The shift from analogue to digital forms of production, reproduction, distribution and display have, more often than not, been accompanied by a polarization of Utopian/ distopian responses to technological developments. Whilst many of these issues are key to a critical re­assessment of art, the nature of the digital art object and the conditions of its virtual display I wish, in this paper, to offer an analysis of the impact and challenge that digital media have had on the practice of contemporary art production itself. Key to this will be a critical examination of Chris Cunningham's hybrid 'Cyberpractice' and the inclusion of his 'Trapeze' installation in the Apocalypse show held at the Royal Academy in 2000. Though this piece itself offers no fundamental challenge to our common understandings of the experience of 'art in the gallery space', his work as a Hollywood special effects 'artist', the production of Fifi (the Nintendo Cyberpixi), his work with Bjork and the Aphex Twin to his inclusion in the Apocalypse show itself act, I would argue, as a fundamental challenge to traditional notions of 'art', 'artist', and 'art work' that environments such as the Whitney and Guggenheim virtual gallery spaces would try to re-impose. 6. Discussion Period. Public Art, Architecture, Institutions, and Art History Section Convenor: Jonathan Harris University of Liverpool, England This section brings together discussion of 'art made for the public' with consideration of the variety of contexts - physical, ideological, social, aesthetic - within which such art has always been located. And because the notion of 'art made for the public' is so broad, or so vacuous, the section encourages a sustained intellectual engagement with the inescapable problems of definition, tradition, and value involved in thinking through the relations of art production to economic, social, and political circumstances. In a much narrower sense, the section explores state patronage of arts in historical and contemporary situations. In particular, the section aims to integrate accounts of architectural setting with art siting. 'Architecture', however, presents as many problems of definition and value as 'public art', and so its apparent synonyms or correlates will also be under scrutiny: 'building', 'the built environment', 'structure', 'the city*, and so on. The section is also intended to raise questions to do with the role the discipline of art history has played in organizing and managing such discussion, as well as its involvement, instrumentally and critically, through both direct and indirect means, in the institutions and ideologies of art patronage. 7»/n if if PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY The Colonization of Public Space ­the Empowerment of Sculpture Jo Darke, Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, England Alison Sleeman, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England Gillian Whiteley University of Leeds, England Sculpture remains one of the most public art forms. From the Eiffel Tower to the St Louis Arch, vast architectural sculptures have become icons of the modern metropolis. In 1889, a quarter of a million people watched the unveiling of Dalou's 'Triumph of the Republic'. A hundred years later, public sculpture provided some of the most evocative images of the fall of the Soviet regime as statues were demolished en masse. Historically, monuments have been erected to legitimize and perpetuate political power structures; they have contributed to the imposition of colonial hegemony. Sculptural objects and structures placed in public space have provided sites of ideological contention that have extended far beyond controversies about aesthetics. Global companies and civic bodies have collaborated on public projects not only to generate/re-generate cultural and capital investment but also to create 'visitor attractions'. Arguably, since the 1950s, conspicuously prestigious public sculpture has been utilised to bestow 'culture' on the fruits of Capital. Every development in the contemporary built environment has its sculptural feature or temporary installation/ intervention, asserting its place in modern­postmodern culture. But what meanings do these public 'sights' convey? Is there a role for contemporary monuments or can space itself commemorate? Can monuments help us recover memory or has memory been subsumed in art? What part do past and present monuments play in the construction of individual and cultural identities? This session will explore the historical and contemporary role of monuments and sculptural objects in public spaces, and consider their impact and interaction with politics, social life, and culture. Focusing on two broad themes, we hope to address the idea of 'contested monuments', especially those affected by local or national conflict, and also to give consideration to issues to do with collective memory, identity, embodiment, and being. 1. Reuben Fowkes University of Essex, England Public Sculpture and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 This paper will consider several aspects of the place of public sculpture in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This includes looking at the role public monuments played in the course of the revolt, the central example of which is the destruction of Budapest's Stalin statue by iconoclastic crowds on the first night of the uprising. This hugely symbolic event was arguably a ritual act of public desecration that transgressed the most sacred site of communist public space. After the suppression of the revolt, many of the statues demolished over the course of the revolution were recast and quietly re-erected. The Stalin statue was not rebuilt, and, in its absence, became a virtual anti-monument to the 1956 Revolution. Its huge socialist realist plinth continued to fulfil its original function as a platform for party dignitaries on public holidays, while subversive urban myths developed surrounding the statue and its downfall. After the fall of communism, veterans' associations rushed to erect monuments to the revolution's martyrs. Many of these were created unofficially, without planning permission or an orderly commissioning process. At the same time, monuments to communists who had died defeating the revolution were removed and placed in Budapest's Statue Park of retired communist public monuments. 2. Lorettan D-Gascard Franklin Pierce College, USA The Berlin Wall: From Border to Object The Berlin Wall was constructed as a literal and emblematic landmark - it delineated a geographic border and isolated ideologies. By the 1970s, the contrast between the Wall's East and West surfaces served to amplify its symbolic presence: The East surface obstructed by border guards and 'no man's land' remained unadorned, while the West surface became a public 'canvas' for sprayed and brush painted images, messages, signs, and ornamentation. When the Wall lost its function as border on 7 November 1989, the West surface became the object of a ritualistic dismantling by a collective stream of 'Mauer Spechte', chinking away at its painted surface. At the same time, monolithic sections were officially hauled off, often repainted with government-friendly slogans and motifs, and installed/exhibited in public spaces. The metamorphosis of the Wall from border to relic and public sculpture was surrounded by political and legal circumstance and suspended between spontaneous dynamism and planned superintendence. Within these constructs, this paper examines the nexus between the public's role in forming and transforming public art; and political dominion (and sway of dominion) in the assessment and identification (and reassessment and re-identification) of such works. :3S ABSTRACTS 3. Joe Kerr Royal College of Art, England Absence in Public Space - tbe Failure of Sculpture in the Aftermath of War The paper discusses the absence of public sculpture after the Second World War, that is to say the failure of sculpture to provide a suitably monumental form in the aftermath of war. Such discussion encompasses specific examples, for example Lubetkin's Lenin Memorial, but also examines broader issues such as photographs superseding physical monuments as the authentic memorials of that conflict. It concludes by looking at how monuments are now suddenly back on the agenda, here and in the United States and elsewhere (for example in Vienna), but are proving equally problematic. Additionally, the paper looks at the persistent failure in Britain to construct the equivalent of a national monument. 4. Paul Usherwood University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England Colliery Disaster Memorials and the Construction of Memory Even though they often pre-date them by many years, colliery disaster memorials in the north east of England tend to be similar to First World War memorials both in appearance and rhetorical style. It might be assumed therefore that the kind of memory (and forgetting) that they perpetuate and the kind of symbolic landscape that they help to create are similar. But this is not necessarily so. This paper looks at these hitherto little studied works and the role that they have played in coping with mass bereavement and in shaping the character of a particular region. 5. Annie Gerin University of Regina, Canada Maitres Chez Nous: Public Art and Linguistic Identity in Quebec With the introduction of issues of difference to the study of culture, one no longer needs to argue that race, gender, and language constitute knowledge, underpinned by ideologies of power and nation, and disseminated through cultural fantasies. We now recognize that these are epistemological fields in their own right, and that they challenge homogeneous historical narratives, which perpetuate themselves by using assumptions of truth to promote a historical status quo. However, while space is used as the main metaphor for 'positioning', it still rarely comes into question as a field of motivated knowledge. Space, as we experience it, is a representation assembled from a complex mixture of lived, conceived, and perceived features; it is simultaneously material, social, and subjective. Furthermore it is particularly malleable through construction, occupation, and appropriation. This paper will examine the production of public art in Quebec in the second half of the 20th century, in relation to francophone identity. Issues of language, cultural identity, law, as well as appropriation of imaginary and material space will be brought together in order to address transformations in conceptions and uses of public space. In this context, public art will be discussed outside the tradition of art history, which understands it as part of the sculptural tradition (three-dimensional objects removed from the museum and placed in another environment.) Indeed, public art is often used to mark a site or a cultural or political presence in an area. It is also often appropriated or deflected from its original purpose. For these reasons, the paper will focus on use rather than form, on diversity rather than tradition, and on conflicting elements within Quebec's nationalistic discourse on space. 6. Shelley Hornstein York University, Canada The Memorial to Walter Benjamin and the Complexities of 'Being There' What does it mean to travel to a remote site of commemoration, particularly for those who may never travel to these monuments? Dani Karavan's Passages ­Memorial to Walter Benjamin heightens the importance of place and the dynamic of geography for commemorating Walter Benjamin yet almost erases itself in the landscape. How do we commemorate if our presence in its site is not possible? Can architecture - the great spatial captor ­capture memory and place? How important is it for a physical monument to exist in a place when the majority who will know of it will do so only through photographs or word-of-mouth? With Karavan's work as a centerpiece, Benjamin's own writings and Derrida's concept of architecture as the writing of space where, as he puts it, a mode of spacing makes a place for the event, I will raise questions about the collision, elision, juxtaposition, and seamlessness of landscape and site, history, and politics. What is anticipated when a site transforms from one tourist economy as a border-crossing to a place where the monument, as catalyst, shifts into an itinerant exhibition of the people in it who have come to pay homage to Walter Benjamin, see a 'Karavan' piece, or try to reconcile the past? By erasing locality or rendering it secondary, this monument garners international currency another international tourist attraction and challenges our ability to discover local context or recover memory. The Roles of Visual Tropes in 17th-and 18th-Century Engravings of Colonial Subjects Christopher Pierce University of Liverpool, England The 20th century was overwhelmed with pronouncements on the epochal cultural transformations to be expected from the advent of photography. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rapidly PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY expanding and increasingly efficient print-making industry developed countless stylizations directed at satisfying the collective desires of the aristocracy, nouveaux riches, and 'contemporary masses'. That this coincided with global European expansionism meant that there was not only a broader and wealthier purchasing public, but one embroiled in an intellectual reformation eager to bring 'things "closer" spatially and humanly'. The commercialism of engraving affected its image: the authority of the object was in direct proportion to its marketability. What visual tropes can be exhumed from this economy? How were social modes of perception satisfied? How are these images diachronic? In the familiar words of Walter Benjamin, 'the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - polities'. Yet for centuries, colonial historians have relied on visual images as evidence in literary investigations. How could they have overlooked the system of economy on which mechanical reproduction depended? Branding the doyens of literary hist oricism as guilty of having their 'eyes wide shut' to the image's economic, political, and visual gamesmanship has two purposes. It forces a general reassessment of established dogma, and it promotes the revision of colonial history by visual means. What are the historiographical effects of recognising the visual tropes in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century engravings of colonial subjects? How do they impact upon our perceptions of colonialism's agenda? 1 Merilyn Savill University of Auckland, New Zealand The Portrayal of Paradise In his comments made with regard to the illustration of Cook's voyages of 1768-80 Bernard Smith claims that 'European painters were not yet ready to renounce staffage elements from their landscapes: rural figures innocently conversing, playing the flute or quietly tending their cattle. Even when they were called upon to depict a different culture the activity of such figures was still provided as a keynote to the mood of the picture.' It suggests that the importance of the figure was secondary to that of the landscape in the manner of Claude, and the French Academic convention favoured by the aesthetics of Shaftesburian civic humanism. It is the contention of this paper, however, that while the figures in the early illustrations are the visual tropes of Smith's assertion, those of John Webber (1750/2-93) of the third voyage, are not. Rather they are subjects of the anthropological records of the social practices of indigenous peoples who act within the confines of a physical landscape. This paper seeks to establish, quite clearly, the influence of the works of Jacques Callot (d.1640) on theTahitian engravings after Webber of Cook's third voyage and to demonstrate the manner in which the various elements were employed to engage the viewer's interest in items of anthropological significance. 2. Megan A. Smetzer University of British Columbia, Canada The Edges of Empire: Negotiating Imperial Space in Captain Cook's Images from the North Pacific Scholars across academic disciplines have extensively analyzed the three voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) and the subsequent illustrated narratives. Among the books and articles, many have specifically addressed the multitude of illustrations, particularly those from the South Pacific, as Cook explored that region most thoroughly. The goal of the third voyage (1776-1780), to find a Northwest Passage through North America, led to the production of images of the North Pacific, including representations of the Native people encountered there. These images, particularly those from Unalaska on the Aleutian Chain of Alaska and Kamchatka in Siberia, have been examined primarily for the ethnographic data contained within them. Rarely, if ever, have the images been considered in terms of how they functioned within a wider network of meanings. In this paper, I will examine four pairs of engravings executed by John Webber, the official expedition artist, in order to illuminate the ambiguities that existed at the edges of the British Empire and reverberated at the centre during the late eighteenth century. Discrepancies arising between text and image in the 1784 publication of Cook's voyage reveal the tensions that existed between the imperial nations of Russia and Britain. By placing Webber's images from Unalaska and Kamchatka, depicting landscape, indigenous peoples, and their domestic interiors within the complex historical and cultural context of the era, I will show that discourses of nationalism, imperialism, trade, and Enlightenment notions of race would have shaped the reading of these images by members of the British public sphere. 3. Sue Wragg University College Northampton, England The Ninth Circle: Imagining Cannibals In the ninth circle of Dante's hell is Ugolino, condemned to devour human flesh through eternity, gnawing on the neck and brains of his earthly tormentor: cannibalism here portrayed as punishment for earthly sin. Indeed, there is some ambiguity as to whether Ugolino committed this atrocity in life, for, as he starved to death, his sons, incarcerated with him, offered themselves as food. Descriptions of cannibalism remained both disturbing and fascinating: a signifier of evil, it was imputed to groups of people in order to demonize them. By 1492 a specific European iconography existed, based on the slander that Jews could be cannibals with a taste for the blood of ABSTRACTS Christian boys; an imagined combination of crimes which helped legitimate brutal persecutions. The fantasy of Jewish cannibalism, much of which appeared in print rather than in the 'high' art format of painting, was both transportable and adaptable, and, I would argue, became the basis for key parts of that European visual vocabulary concerned with new worlds. Seeing or possessing such representations produced a frisson for the collector and the 'contemporary masses': wonder at the sight of strangeness, horror in the face of the atrocities depicted. The trick for the artist, working at second hand, was to make images at once strange and recognizable; terror of the unknown cloaked in the safety of the familiar. 4. Betsie Gross University of Southern California, USA The Imperial Imaginary To place Georges Cuvier's and Henri de Blainville's racist 'scientific' findings regarding the body of the 'Venus Hottentot', Saartjie Baartman, into a broader historical context, I cast my net furher back in time to Francois le Vaillant's Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa by the Way of Good Hope in the Years 1880, 81,82, 83, 84 and 85 (1790) and John Barrow's An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798 (1801). Le Vaillant's and Barrow's engagement with the subject of 'Hottentot' women, particularly with regard to their prominent derrieres and extended genitalia, mirrors later concerns expressed by Cuvier and de Blainville. The 'Venus Hottentot' form becomes a subsequent point of departure for discussing bodies of women from the Cape of Good Hope throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. In conjunction with primarily textual manifestations from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that reference the bodies of 'Hottentot' women at the Cape of Good Hope, I'd like to take a closer look at visual evidence, various nineteenth-century prints reproduced by Kirby, Altick, Gilman, and other scholars in conjunction with their discussions regarding the 'Venus Hottentot's' display in Paris and London. 5. Stephanie Pratt University of Plymouth, England Sight and Oversight: Early Modern Images of Native Americans as Forms of Knowledge My paper will address a continuing problem in the understanding and interpretation of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prints concerning Native Americans. There is a noted tendency in historical books about America to use such illustrations merely as mute witnesses to a carefully argued text and to ignore the historical nature of the visual representation as codified within the printed image. One primary example is the illustrations made for Francois Du Creux's Historia Canadensis (1664) placed in a recent historical text close to another set of well-known illustrations found in the Codex Canadensis and dated c. 1700. What the authors (Cummings, et al) have failed to see is that there is a direct visual relationship between both sets of images that is clearly based in the historical situation of the Jesuits in New France around the turn of the century. My intention is to place these misused images back again into their proper historical context as systems and forms of knowledge created within a larger context of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century European visual culture. Alternative Modernisms David Peters Corbett University of York, England Michael Leja University of Deleware, USA The existing literature of modernism continues to be dominated by definitions and methodologies derived from the powerful descriptions of French art after 1850 developed over the last 50 years and setting out a set of themes - the 'society of the spectacle', the dialectic of urbanisation and suburbanisation, the appearance of the flaneur, the fluid nature of late-nineteenth-century class structures, among them - through which the work of French artists from the 1850s onwards are read. One of the major consequences of this dominance has been to make art and cultural circumstances which do not fit neatly into the moulds offered by the literature on France marginal and to some extent invisible objects of analysis. Art produced elsewhere, in Europe or in the United States prior to the end of the Second World War, can only unhandily be made to mesh with these conceptual categories and terms of analysis. Impelled by a perception of this situation, the last five years have seen a growth of work on alternative modernisms that endeavours to revise our understanding of art-historical modernism through the study of places and times outside France after 1850. This session brings together papers on such 'alternative modernisms' to open out discussion of these issues to a wider range of chronological and geographical areas than has hitherto been the case. 1. Michael Asbury Camberwell College of Art, England Is Brazilian 'Modernismo' an Alternative Modernism? Consensual art history positions Brazilian Modernismo as an alternative modernity since its emphasis on national identity is quite distinct from the 'purer' aesthetic concerns of European modernism. Such a distinction is PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY often argued by referring to Modernismo's most notorious legacy: the Anthropophagite Manifesto, written by Oswald de Andrade in 1928. The manifesto proposed to devour European culture in the spirit of the native cannibals who ritually devoured their enemies in order to gain their strength. The self emerges from the misappropriation of the Other. Hybrid strategies like Anthropophagy serve to differentiate other modernities such as those in Latin America from their European 'models' by emphasising irreverence over mimicry. However, it could be argued that similar processes and concerns were also present within the nationalistic rhetoric of French modernism (the primary reference in Modernismo) during the 1920s. This paper will discuss Brazilian Modernismo in the light of events in Paris. It will argue that Modernismo's hybrid strategies went beyond negotiations between the centre and periphery to propose an art that, through ambivalence, was able to contain the contradictions present in the appropriated model itself. These contradictions can be seen in the combined efforts of Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral to resolve a very Brazilian problem: to produce an art that was aesthetically in tune with Europe yet that asserted its difference. 2. Ysanne Holt University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England Charles Sims' Spirituals and the 'Isolation Ward' of the Royal Academy in the 1920s In a posthumous display at the Royal Academy in 1928, the artist Charles Sims, whose suicide had occurred earlier that year, was represented by a remarkable series of six 'Spirituals' completed shortly after his return from New York in 1927. Much controversy surrounded the display of these mystical, symbolic evocations of the wandering soul's torment and ultimate release - painted by an artist hitherto associated with plein-air impressionism, spectacular society portraiture and, latterly, fanciful arcadian idylls derived from eighteenth century feres galantes. The modernity of these final images suggest tantalizing encounters with diverse sources from nineteenth-century spirit photography to expressionist films like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to the zigzags, lightening flashes, and splintered forms assimilated into Art Deco. The dislocated figure depicted in the 'Spirituals' is a powerful imaging of an individual struggling to represent traditional themes through forms of contemporary modernist visual culture. Seeing the works displayed in their 'isolation ward' at the Academy, reviewers were hard pressed to account for the artist's sudden personal and aesthetic departure and regarded them as a modern reinterpretation of the native vision of William Blake - then undergoing reappraisal. This was little more than an attempt to recoup a suite of paintings, which, in the added circumstances of Sims' suicide, proved an embarrassment. The challenge today is to rehabilitate extraordinary images, which reject the spectacular in contemporary society and, in a modernist language, attempt to address its darker torments. 3. Karen Lang University of Southern California, USA Beckmann and Inconceivable Modernism This paper will address Max Beckmann's painting in relation to early 20th century French and German modernism. I will argue that, while Beckmann was considered 'modern' by virtue of his interpretations of the experience of contemporary life, he was nevertheless the creator of an art that could not be conceived as 'modernist'. Although Beckmann was inspired by what he termed the 'deep space' of Cezanne's pictorial architecture, something which as 'flatness' would go on to become central features in the framework of (French) modernist painting, the deep space of Beckmann's canvases, though painted in a 'new' style, rendered his art inconceivable according to the concept of modernism being developed in the years 1907-1912. The second part of this paper will inquire into the construction of the concept of modernism itself. Drawing on work by Ernst Cassirer I will analyze the conceptual move from member of a series (of works of art) to the form of a series (called modernism). This, I will argue, is the end game of modernist painting - the move that transforms it into the category that has for so long excluded the 'alternative modernisms' that are the subject of this session. 4. J. M. Mancini National University of Ireland, Ireland Modernism is an Anthology Most attempts to define American modernism have focused on its aesthetic, discursive qualities, and on the 'original' output of artists. Yet, an examination of the meta-discursive contexts reveals that, in the United States, the project of modernism unfolded in the establishment of new practices and institutions for the definition, display, dissemination, and reception of culture as much as in the creation of new artworks. This is nowhere so apparent as in the career of Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery '291' and journal Camera Work, much more than his own photography, worked to meet the uncertainty of the modern future by encoding 'primitive' and disappearing others into readable, archivable, modern texts, and to contain the crushing pace of modern change by constructing the viewing experience as a series of epiphanies, outside of time. A similar motive can be detected both among Stieglitz's fellow artists - for example, in Robert Henri's ethnic portraits - and in other disciplines, most notably the folk music anthologies of Ruth Crawford Seeger and Harry Smith and Franz Boas' collections of Native American texts. Like Stieglitz's anthropological displays, these and other projects served a central modernist aim: the creation of technologies for the containment of authenticity. By examining the personal and cultural connections between the three disciplines of art, anthropology, and musicology, it is my purpose to add a new dimension to existing definitions of modernism in American culture. ABSTRACTS 5. Richard Meyer University of Southern California, USA Cecil Beaton and the Bad Dream of Modernism What becomes of modernism when it falls into the 'wrong hands'? What happens when vanguard forms of art and architecture are reworked by aesthetically conservative and proudly anti-modern figures? Do such re-workings have a place within the history of modernism? Or are they better taken as fringe cases of an alternative visual culture that fully deserves, perhaps even revels in, its marginalized status? My paper pursues these questions by considering the work of the fashion and society photographer Cecil Beaton as it intersected with the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier and the modernist painting of Jackson Pollock. The paper traces how Beaton's commitments to photography, interior decoration, and homosexual culture came into contact with modernist projects that would seem to disavow those same terms. In focusing on Beaton, I try both to understand and to pose an alternative to what T.J. Clark has called 'the bad dream of modernism' wherein vanguard art is inevitably flattened by the machinery of consumerism and cliche. The paper therefore shuttles between history and historiography, between particular moments in Beaton's career and the ways in which those moments have been addressed or ignored by recent scholarship. 6. Alexandra Stara Kingston University, England Modern City, Ancient Streets: Pikionis' Acropolis Project The Greek architect Demetris Pikionis was a contemporary of Le Corbusier deeply influenced by the teachings of modernism. His life's work, however, was to seek a properly Greek modern architecture, a quest which inevitably put him at odds with the principles of the International Style and the modernist canon. What was 'alternative' about his modernism is the refusal to sacrifice memory and place in the altar of novelty and universality. Throughout his career he consistently explored the possibilities of realising an architecture genuinely 'of its time', but equally so 'of its place'. In his crowing achievement, the complex landscaping project around the Acropolis of Athens in the 1950s, he showed that, ultimately, the significance of modernism did not lie in its adolescent desire for radical rupture and difference, but in its potential to articulate a truly contemporary ethos through a situated dialectic of traces. In that sense, it is this paper's proposal that the Acropolis project is far from a turn to conservatism for Pikionis, but rather the masterpiece of a mature modern sensibility. Legitimizing Art in Public: The Development of Art Institutions and Exhibitions c. 1750-1914 James Moore and Dongho Chun University of Manchester, England Recently, increasing attention has been paid to the institutional history of art. Germane to this process is an awareness of the significance of art institutions and their exhibitions in shaping the public taste for art. Museums, galleries, artistic clubs, societies, and associations are all forms of art institution concerned with the public production and consumption of art beyond the private realm of individual artists and patrons. Also, the practice of holding exhibitions to reach a wider and/or appropriate public has been common in most art institutions. Needless to say, art institutions have been primarily intended, or claimed to be intended, to mobilize and foster the public concern and taste for art, but they have inevitably reflected, and helped to instigate, broader social discourses rather than merely aesthetic issues. This session seeks to bring together research on the roles, functions, and polemics of different art institutions within their concrete historical contexts - political, economic, and social, etc - with a view to throwing fresh light on the histories, ideologies, and cultural politics of art institutions and their exhibitions. Exploring the underworld of art institutions and exhibitions, this strand aims to address the issue of legitimizing the production and consumption of art in public, and hopes to prompt some fruitful interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. 1. Angela M. Opel Munich Alte Pinakothek, Germany Un ouvrage compose dans un gout nouveau': The Development of Art Didactics' and Public Display under the Elector Palatinate, c. 1750-1800 This paper focuses on the change of a Baroque princely picture gallery into a 'public museum' and on the art pedagogic intentions and politics of taste which are manifested in the composition of a mid-eighteenth-century public display of collection within such a gallery. The Elector Palatinate, Carl Theodor von der Pfalz (1724-1799) was one of the first sovereigns on the continent (the first in Germany) to open his picture gallery in Dusseldorf - nucleus of today's Alte Pinakothek, Munich - to the public around 1750 for the benefit of art students and an interested public, so combining economic interests with socio-political ideas of enlightened absolutism. The Elector's Zeichnungskabinett in Manheim - predecessor of today's Staatliche Graphische Sammulung in Munich - was founded in 1758 and likewise PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY through a public display made accessible to the public. Through archival material as well as research on the drawings themselves it is possible today to reconstruct the display of the collection in the late 1750s consisting of more than 550 pictures and get an idea of the beginnings of contemporary art pedagogy and didactics. The paper will analyse the impetus and rhetoric for going public and will show the development of an 'enlightened' and 'modern' art and display policy tempered by princely/personal taste. 2. Sig hie Bhreathnach-Lynch National Gallery of Ireland, Ireland A National Gallery for Ireland: Issues of Ideological Significance On 30 January, 1846, the National Gallery of Ireland, dedicated to 'the noble objects of promoting and fostering the genius of the country and of contributing to the refined pleasures and intellectual enjoyments of the community at large' was formally opened by the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carlisle. This paper traces the history of the Gallery throughout the nineteenth century; from the initiative in setting it up in 1853, through to its realization just over ten years later, and the manner in which the institution evolved in the decades that followed. These developments are examined within the context of issues of ideological significance. Drawing on the museological theories of cultural historians Tony Bennett and Carol Duncan, the paper analyses the motivations behind the proposal to set up a national cultural institution in Ireland, how 'Irishness' was defined, particularly through its collection policy, and the implication of factors such as site and location, display, and space. The institution was to prove to be a producer of potent symbolic meanings and is important in the context of nineteenth-century cultural politics and emerging concepts of national identity. 3. Fae Brauer The University of New South Wales, Australia The Persistence of Institutional Power: The French State, the Academy and Official Art in the time of Cubism When Henri-Charles Dujardin Beaumetz was appointed French Undersecretary for the Arts in 1905, he promised to implement a Radical Republican policy supporting cultural pluralism and democratizing the State's decision-making processes. Yet despite his inception of equitable councils and committees, they became dominated by Academicians. Despite reassertion of the Salon des Artistes Francais' principle of universal suffrage, its juries and committees remained monopolized by Academicians. Despite reforms to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, its professors remained Academicians. Through its nepotistic network of relationships with State committees, councils, the Ecole and the Salons, the Academy seemed to exercise, behind the scenes, what the Socialist Deputy Simyan called an 'invisible hegemony'. Doubly masked by its counter­balancing strategies of selection and exclusion, he concluded that the Academy had successfully manipulated the State machinery to safeguard its cultural capital and ostracize Modernism. Through a close reading of Simyan's 1911 parliamentary Report, in conjunction with the painting bringing these institutional players together in one tableau ­Jules Grun's Un Vendredi au Salon des Artistes Francais ­this paper will investigate whether the eclectically democratic policies of Dujardin-Beaumetz were thwarted by the Academy. By identifying the discrete clusters of academicians and politicians in Grun's tableau, as well as its marginalizations and absences, it will consider why it may have been this network of coteries which shaped, following Bourdieu, a field of cultural production and legitimation in which Academicians were the dominant artists in the time of Cubism. 4. Anne Nellis Brown University, USA Collecting for the 'Public' in the Domestic Interior, 1798-1824 While public venues for the display of art, such as the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the National Gallery, have been receiving increasing scholarly attention, less-studied private collections provided some of the most important spaces of 'public' display in early nineteenth-century London. In this talk, I shall examine the discourses surrounding private collections in this period and the ways in which these depended on underlying notions of foreignness, 'domesticity', and Britishness, as well as femininity and masculinity. In particular, I shall focus on the collection of the Marquess of Stafford, which was opened to a limited public in May, 1806. Stafford's large collection of (mostly) old masters, which included many from the Orleans collection, was the subject of two important cataloguing projects. As the Stafford case shows, an emphasis on discourses of 'domesticity' was key to the process of justifying collecting important paintings in private houses rather than in public collections. By interrogating the meanings of 'domesticity' within the context of discourses about public and private, gender, travel and empire, we can see how the rhetoric of the 'domestic' bolsters arguments ranging from the continued importance of collecting old masters to the politics of display. 5. Laura Newton University of Northumbria at Newcastle. England 'To Educate the Eye and the Soul': The Newcastle Exhibitions c.1863-1890 By the mid nineteenth century the belief that exposure to art was beneficial to both rich and poor - as a source of refinement, elevation for the soul, a panacea to industrialised society's ills, an education in morality, 'taste' and good design - was common currency. This paper will explore how far successive exhibiting societies in Newcastle succeeded in developing the 'taste for art' during the second half of the nineteenth century. Central to this is the identification of the major organisers and patrons, consideration of the impact and critical reception provoked by the public display of key private collections, the ability to attract major contemporary 43 ABSTRACTS artists and the localised attempts to educate public 'taste'. I will argue that the Newcastle exhibitions reflect the belated yet full flowering of north-east industrialism and its attendant societal changes. The exhibition societies, far from being merely distant outposts of Royal Academy elitism operated, in the first instance, as a hegemonic tool of the area's bourgeoisie, echoing the ethos of metropolitan venues such as the Grosvenor Gallery; but increasingly stimulated and sustained a less class-based culture of local art production and consumption supported by a well-informed local press. 6. Helen Rees University of Manchester, England Contesting the Canon of Heritage: The Burlington Magazine and the National Gallery, London, 1903-1911 This paper will identify and discuss the fundamental shifts that occurred in the status and meaning of acquisitions of Old Master paintings by the National Gallery from 1903 to the outbreak of the First World War. During this period, the trustees of the National Gallery came under growing pressure not only as a result of the continuing expansion of the international art market in Old Masters, but also due to their failure to adopt the principles of the new 'science of connoisseurship' espoused in England by critics such as Roger Fry and Charles Holmes. As a consequence, the increasingly costly purchases made by the gallery were subject to unprecedented scrutiny, particularly in The Burlington Magazine, which had been founded in 1903 and which, from 1904 onwards, was effectively controlled by Fry until he finally assumed the editorship in 1909. From the start, the Burlington acted as a kind of bridgehead from which Fry and Holmes mounted their assault on the Gallery, culminating in a sustained barrage of protest at the prolonged failure of the Trustees to appoint a new Director to succeed Sir Edward Poynter (who resigned in the wake of the scandal over the purchase of the Marquis of Northampton's 'Durer' in 1904). Eventually, Fry himself was offered the position and, although he was unable to accept it, the offer was notable as an instance of the institutionalization of dissent and an admission of the incipient professionalization of art history in England (although it would not be taught as a university degree for another 26 years). By 1914, the authority of the Gallery had been challenged - artistically, politically, economically - for more than a decade, as a consequence of which the Trustees were obliged to justify their collecting practices in new ways, i.e. with explicit reference to the history of English collecting as well as to the history of Western European art. 7. Chrissy Partheni Walker Art Gallery, England Art as a Matter of Civic Pride: The Stories and Ideologies of the Walker Art Gallery The history of the Walker Art Gallery's foundation in 1873 is interwoven with the history of the economy and society of Liverpool: the wealth and influence of important art collectors and patrons, as well as a vibrant artistic scene, not always in agreement with the will and taste of those who formed the clientele of high art. In addition, state interference by the Liverpool Town Council and donations by public figures, such as Andrew Barclay Walker (1824-1893), who paid for the Gallery's building, all contributed to the establishment of the gallery as not simply a permanent home for important historical collections of art but an institution promoting the work of contemporary artists through the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions. In this paper I aim to unravel the political tensions of the Walker as an institution in the nineteenth century, and to explore the historical legacy of the will of enlightened benefactors and committees of the past to use art to instruct the lives and elevate the morals of the local population. Who actually constituted the public for the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions, who was in control of the decision making process, and furthermore what were, and are, the political complexities of a civic gallery assuming a national status and role? Civilized Painting Paul Barlow University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England Colin Trodd University of Sunderland, England 'Public art' - most centrally History Painting ­is a concept that was crucial to the definition of 'fine art' as codified in the Renaissance. Up to the nineteenth century it held the position as the highest of art forms, and as the embodiment of public values within Fine Art. According to standard histories of Western art, History Painting 'declines' during the nineteenth century, to be replaced by modes of artistic practice in which the roles of narrative and Public Art cease to have the same meaning. This session will look at the way in which a declining Public Art aesthetic came to be defined, and how it was sustained in this period of so-called vulgarization. 1. Tony Halliday writer, England Rearranging Academic Hierarchies The doctrine of a hierarchy of the genres was widely questioned in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. The artists who challenged its validity did so in the name of revolutionary values. They presented their views as a logical and inevitable extension of social egalitarianism - an attack on the very basis of academic privilege. Their version of events has been accepted by later commentators. This paper will argue that the attack was prompted by quite specific tactical considerations. Those who challenged the doctrine were themselves PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY drawn from a privileged minority - ex-Academicians, their pupils, and their cronies. Their purpose was to safeguard their own ascendancy as producers in a post-academic art market where they had to compete for the first time with artists from very different backgrounds. While challenging the hierarchy of the genres, they drew on other aspects of academic theory and practice in order to fashion criteria the better to differentiate their own productions from those of their competitors. 2. Duncan Forbes Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Scotland Historical Subject Painting in Scotland 1820-1850 As the 'communal civic' values articulated within the British History Painting tradition were placed under intolerable strain - in part by the forging of the British state itself - this paper examines what emerged in its wake north of the border. Concentrating on the work of William Allan, it accounts for the rapid rise and popularity of Scottish historical painting during the 1820s, both in Edinburgh and to a lesser extent, London. Fuelled by the Enlightenment realization of sudden historical change, Allan participated in a widespread retrospective invention of Scottish nationhood, drawing in particular on the writings of the 'valedictory realist', Walter Scott. This paper concentrates on the context of Allan's historical productions: the attempts by his patrons, including Scott, to promote his Scottish subjects; the artist's involvement in the print industry; the support for romantic ideologies from within the institutions of Scottish art; and the critical reception of Allan's work. It assesses what was at stake in Allan's articulation of an 'historical realism' within a wider public culture. 3. Colin Trodd Artful Annihilations and Generations of the Public, or Victorian Art Criticism and the Impossibility of William Blake In recent decades Blake, almost alone among the key figures in British Romanticism, has been venerated as the King of Critical Dissent: opposed to commercial society and the empire of capital, he has been identified as the purveyor of a communal aesthetic based on radical principles where the social body is at once mystical, aesthetic, and popular. If Blake has become a fantastical incarnation of 'freedom', it would be useful to discover the values at work here, and consider the conditions of his cultural disinterment and subsequent after-life. Although the Victorian 'discovery' of Blake's paintings took many forms before their display at the Burlington Fine Art Club in 1876, most commentators were more concerned with the capacity of his commercial designs to visualize and embody the ideas of other poets; and if Gilchrist's Life (1863) accommodated Blake's productions within an expressive model of aesthetic identity - thus equating their public character with Ruskinian moralism - the majority of art critics tended to agree with Froude, for whom the images in The Songs represented the 'prodigal carelessness of nature'. This paper charts the generation of critical practices whereby the Rossettis, Swinburne, Scott, Symons, and others struggled to overcome the image of the 'uselessness' or 'excessiveness' of Blake, and examines how it was imagined his 'private' designs might be transported into 'public' ideas. In addition to considering why theories of Blake's art entailed some recognition or account of a public for such works, the paper addresses the problem associated with this process of 'civilizing' or 'purifying' his artistic identity. The conditions of this conflict - between the need to preserve Blake's status as an autotelic creator of impossible subjects, and the desire to place his designs within a believable tradition of public art - are explored by looking at 'Blakean emanations' in Victorian art discourse: the critical surrogates of D.G. Rossetti, G.F. Watts, and James Smetham. 4. Elizabeth Prettejohn University of Plymouth, England Swinburne, Political Engagement, and 'Art for Art's Sake' The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne can be regarded as the theorist of English 'art for art's sake'. He was the first to use the term in its now familiar sense, and his assertion of art's independence from social and moral responsibility was the most uncompromising and the most rigorously argued of the period (more so even than that of his intellectual mentor, Baudelaire). Yet Swinburne was also a committed republican and advocate of radical political change; he wrote verse in praise of revolution and revered both the activism and the political poetry of Victor Hugo. How could Swinburne's enthusiasm for the public realm of politics co-exist with his espousal of a (seemingly) escapist art theory? And if Swinburne the activist can be reconciled with Swinburne the aesthete, how does that change our understanding of 'art for art's sake', either as a theoretical doctrine or as an art practice? 5. Paul Barlow Picasso's Watts: Or 'Privatizing' Public Art The rise of the avant-garde is typically seen as a radicalizing project within art history, but it can just as easily be understood as a privatizing project. Indeed critical praise of avant-garde interventions often sounds like Thatcherite defences of the privatization of public industries: replacing sclerotic centralised bureaucracies (read: 'academicism'), with lean, innovative, and dynamic entrepreneurship. What does this tell us about the kind of radicalism ascribed to the avant-garde? This paper will explore the problem of the 'privatizing' of the aesthetic in the origins of the avant-garde and in the decline of public art itself. To what extent is privatized culture built into the very idea of avant-garde art? If we compare the paintings of Picasso's Blue Period with contemporary work by the 'lumbering' Victorian worthy G.F. Watts we see some remarkable similarities. Picasso at this time is almost as close to Watts as he was later to be to Braque. Both artists construct pictorial scenarios centring on moments of compromised and marginalized intimacy. In ABSTRACTS both, form is drained by colour. However, Watts' art was explicitly public in intent, part of a massive project to reconstruct history painting. Picasso's career was marked by de facto, if ambivalent, resistance to the claims of public art. What does this tell us about the connection between these apparently alien figures? What - post-Picasso - can be claimed for Watts' project? 6. Nina Liibbren Anglia Polytechnic University The Historical Anecdote The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new mode of narrative painting throughout Europe. The grand narrative tradition was reworked into a highly versatile, thoroughly modern, and also increasingly private idiom. This paper focuses on European anecdotal history paintings of the 1870s o 1900s, that is, on a type of painting that, for many art historians, continues to epitomize the decline of academic painting as a serious enterprise. However, this seemingly trivial but immensely popular mode of visual story-telling addressed fundamental issues of modernity's relationship to the past and individuals' relationship to their nation. Anecdotal histories interpellated a mass, mostly middle-class audience, either unfamiliar with or uninterested in the traditional grand narratives. The paintings aimed to entertain rather than to instruct or exhort, and thereby replaced earlier public and official modes of address. Formerly public issues were transformed into private, psychologizing mini-narratives, and although these were no longer commissioned by governments or other civic patrons, they did partake of the new mass media public sphere, as evidenced in their wide circulation in both art and popular press. The paper explores these issues with reference to images from across Europe, including Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Austria, and Spain. Hybrid Narratives in Contemporary Art Margery Amdur University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA When artists think of hybridity. they often think of mixed media artworks or of mixing cultural traditions. Both of these strategies are important - in fact they seem almost inevitable. This session will involve presentations about hybrid forms of creating narratives. However common this tactic might be textually, it is not very common visually. The session will examine the heterogeneous fusion in the visual arts of divergent types of narrativity: oral traditions (which always have a perceptual aspect, as in African films, like those from Birkino Faso); musical traditions, with their links to visual rhythms or cadences (think of Rauschenberg's collaboration with John Cage); and different ways of telling a story in the West (think of the Renaissance use of sequential views to relate an unfolding story or the modernist device of ellipsis that Matisse used so well). All of these hybrid narratives employ various media and engage with different visual languages. Yet, foregrounding the temporal 'mestizaje' is what we wish to underscore - a temporal mixture that combines competing concepts of history from various cultures; and diverse ideological elements with the life of the same individual artist, what Freud termed 'parallax'. 1. Joshua Mosley University of Pennsylvania, USA Balancing Agile Montage My recent animations have emerged as short, poetic films, incorporating lyrical texts, music, semi-philosophical discussions between humans and animals, and visual interactions among periphery elements that puncture narrative continuities. The writing process for these time-based works has usually been initiated by composing serial strings of reflections from non-linear collections of thoughts. In past works the serial word strings, or poems, have been translated to existing and imaginary languages while engaged in a process of collaborating with other visual artists or musicians. The characteristics of the language chosen and the collaboration itself has introduced new considerations towards the subject matter and associated imagery. For me, collaboration has revitalized the process of creating digital works that develop slowly. I will screen recent works and talk about my recent local and international collaborative exchanges. 2. Andrew Johnson University of Buffalo, USA Draw the Straight Line and Swallow it Narrative was always hybrid by definition with perspicuous temporal sequences of disparate events, connected by causality or not. But whose narrative was it? Your master narrative or my fictionalization of you? My self-serving chronicles or your occlusions of me? Given our past perspectives, on what panoply do we agree? Or should we arrest the array? Once upon a time, the iconic was exclusive and subjugating. Now, the polyvalent prevails, promising freedom and inclusivity that, lamentably, seems an illusion. The singular has been sacrified, disembowelled, and strewn about to display apparently infinite choices. 'Draw the Straight Line and Swallow it' (a re-phrasing of Lamount Young's 'Draw the Straight Line and Follow it') considers re-embracing the singular, not in the minimalist stance that eschews density of interpretetion and the historical, but in one that questions the consumerist mentality that more is PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY better. This presentation examines the political implications of, dangers in, and ultimately unalterable conditions that lie at the core of narration. Featured is 'Fine Lines', a series of tarnished metal shadow paintings that favour implosion rather than explosion, depth over expansion, and distillation versus dilution, ultimately critiquing and simultaneously embracing the impossibility of the non-narrative. 3. Clayton Merrell Carnegie-Mellon University, USA Dissembling Narrative and Self-Devouring Facts This paper will address the work of authors and artists whose work embodies the seriousness and urgency of telling something, of getting to the point, coupled with the patent impossibility of doing so directly, because their subject is so evanescent or pervasive or subtle as to elude attack from any single angle. This necessitates strategies of circling around, of evasion, of digression and apparent aimlessness - all in the interest of catching a glimpse of this elusive subject. Recent writers who use these strategies include: W.G. Sebald, Juan Rulfo, Peter Handke, and Annie Dillard. Examples from their work will be used to illuminate the use of similar strategies by such dissimilar artists as: Douglas Gordon, Amy Sillman, Louise Bourgeois, John Wesley, Martin Ramirez, and Neo Rausch. This type of work makes contradictory declarations on the way to being anti-declarative, pays minute attention to its ostensible subject matter only to make us notice what lies just behind it, and gives clues and counter-clues to keep us moving along decoy paths from which we can triangulate the location of the 'real' one. Following the trace of story and purpose, we as viewers and readers unwittingly lay out behind us lines which taken together form an intricate web of thousands of tiny connections, that, trembling and tenuous, form the means to catch something we had not even known we were looking for. I will close the paper with examples from a current book project of my own which uses the simultaneous clarity and ambiguity of scientific writing and imagery to a similar end. 4. Lisa Tamiris Becker. Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, USA Hybridity and Hybrid Narrativity in the Work of Julio Gal an and Roberto Juarez This paper will investigate divergent approaches to hybridity and hybrid narrativity in the work of two of the most important mid-career Latin-American painters working today, Julio Galan and Roberto Juarez. While both artists investigate seminal issues in painting, Galan's work focuses on the autopoetic/ autoerotic figure, merging overtly gay autobiography with explorations of graffiti, pattern, and the abstract mark. Galan's figurative narrativity spans references to Velazquez's dwarfs, transvestitism, and Frida Kahlo, while he additionally layers his narratives with expressionist marks, graffiti-like 'tags' and citations form the history of abstraction. The works fuse subject and object into surrealistic self-portraiture, combining painted illusion with attached mixed-media objects such as eyeglasses, sashes, and other manifestations of personal adornment. Mexican born, Julio Galan, also employs recontextualized Catholic iconography, uncannily collaging magazine cut-outs with painted imagery and text. By contrast, Chicago born painter, Roberto Juarez presents dense abstract paintings that merge 'optic' and 'haptic' modes of perception. His lushly layers works draw on patterns derived from a study of urban space and architecture, also referencing and interweaving other social and aesthetic fabrics, including Bauhaus textiles, African Kente cloths, Baroque floral textile patterns, and Meso-American motifs. Juarez's formal hybridity is evident in works such as 'New Apartments DMV (2000) and 'Orange Wiring' (2000) where he fuses the visceral, skin-like quality of paper, with the 'visual presence' of the large canvas, as he mounts layers of richly painted, translucent paper to large stretched canvases. Embedded within Juarez's hybrid abstract lexicon is always a figurative reference. Juarez's floral marks bear erotic-likeness to both male and female human anatomy, while the architectonic patterns are encoded with the dense spatial experience of navigating contemporary urban architecture. Though derived from narratives of contemporary urbanity, Juarez's hybrid works remain strongly tied to the spatial mappings and narratives of multiple visual precedents, including the African spatial motifs found in Kente and Kuba cloths, as well as the Modernist textiles of Annie Albers. 5 Paul Hubbard Moore College of Art and Design, USA Hybrid Narrative When the expression and sensibility of sculpture and materials are transmuted hybridization is the resultant event. The synthesis of disparate objects fuse at this moment, given rise to emerging junctions, passages, and visual experiences, which take on new meaning. These emergent visual and sensory pathways begin to initiate the hybrid narrative. The transmutation of these 'intersections' begin to tell a story. These intersecting layers come together as a moments which create pathways to be visual and kinesthetically interpreted by the viewer. The narrative is accessible to the viewer on very basic sensory motor awareness that may transport the viewer to move through the three dimensional space on various levels of consciousness. The observer is encouraged to read the contextual clues so they can navigate the space in a manner in which may comfort their perceptions or confront them. These multifaceted 'intersections' are particularly interesting moments of transversion when seemingly distinct histories, technologies, and philosophies are encouraged to converge with each other. In my own work I feel free to draw from a variety of sources and references which are deeply personal and special. My work is infused with architecture, philosophy, scientific discovery, logic and memory maps past and present. I clearly maintain roots in antiquity while also spanning into the contemporary moment. I selectively collect objects and artefacts for which I shape a space to encompass these diverse elements. Through this alembic process these articles redefine themselves into various levels of development ABSTRACTS before it achieves a sense of wholeness and balance and successfully accomplishes this transformation. In this presentation I will employ slides to demonstrate this hybrid narrative. In a recent work 'Chemical Hybrid' (2001) the piece cannot be read in the straight narrative sense. Hybrid forms such as the mercury hourglass and seemingly floating steps serve as to bridge metaphors for time and space. In the work the observer plays an important role by being challenged to find his or her own narrative path. Quantum physics appears now to be indicating that the role of the observer in an experiment is vital in determining its outcome, also suggesting that the experimenters have the ability to actually manipulate matter and events through the use of a strong visual imagination, indicating that physics has an ever-growing conceptual element. 6. Martha Gelarden Moore College of Art and Design, USA Notes On Hybrid Narrative If a hybridizer crosses two unrelated species or elements of words from different languages and a narrator is one who relates a story or account between the scenes of a play, then these definitions provide clues to the nature of my inquiry. Like a hybridizer of plants, I have a reasonable sense of the solution before I begin the process. Hybridizers systematically develop an idea, or cross - the outcome is anticipated beforehand, form and context are the variables. As a narrator, I get to tell a story anyway I choose, as long as I reveal something hidden or an 'aside'. The narrator restates and interprets the narrative between the scenes. The 'between' or the time space interval between the notes or parts is really interesting to me. Traditionally, sculptors formally speak of three-dimensional form as primary and secondary. Secondary forms are created when two primary forms converge, a hybrid. Whereas the narrator is the connector by proximity between space and time. I do use seemingly unrelated parts and interbreed them. Why not cross genetics with popular culture? The parts also are attached to ideas sparked by current events or phrases from history. This conceptual process allows me the freedom to travel and collect throughout space and time. My images may be experienced like reading a newspaper. Something visual, a headline or photographic image teases the reader and then a smaller boxed paragraph may restate the teaser and direct the reader to actually enter the publication. In other words, my hybrid narratives are visually accessible to the viewer on the most basic level. The reader then has choices, turn the page directly to the story or read from front to back, accumulating information en route to the original teaser story. Both readers get to the story, but in the end because of the collective experience the in depth reader is rewarded with 'discoveries made on the way to looking something else up'. Many quiet bits of information when added to the original continue to compound creating multiple layers. Recently I developed 'Self-Serve Self-Portraits': art and science for the do-it-yourselfer, a series of low-tech tools inspired by the mapping of the Human Genome code in which the viewer is encouraged to take the conceptual role of creator. The Human Genome code's four little letters 'c a t g' repeated 30,000 times make up an individual's DNA, their past and present and future. The mapping of the code is a rich resource for hybridization and the viewer gets to create his or her personal narrative. And so it goes, the hybrid narrative is first created by me, recreated by the viewer, and hopefully the result is recreation. Martha Gelarden will show images of her work that demonstrate her systemic practice of hybrid narrative. She will include images that may help the viewer decipher an iconography both personal, historical, and contemporary, and participate in a conceptual process that produces a non-linear tale of imaginary scientific discovery and obsessive compulsive layers. Fun with DNA. The Other Europe: Art, Identity, and Politics in the Shadow of the First World Angela Dimit rakaki and Brandon Taylor University of Southampton, England The fractured geopolitical boundaries of modern Europe, from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the Collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and beyond, have given rise to multiple and repeated distortions in prevailing images of the values, causal connections and achievements of many parts of what we call 'modern art'. Also the term 'postmodernism', which today seems already exhausted, has been problematic in its marginalization of histories, practices, and arguments perceived as falling outside the perimeter of dominant cultural references even in a European context. This strand examines the impact of the centre/periphery model (as an ideological construct and a lived reality) on the development of art practice and theory across diverse geographies in Europe, considering the dynamics of cultural translation in progress. 1. Shona Kallestrup University of Aberdeen, Scotland Centre/Periphery in Romanian National Artistic Identity c. 1900 Studies of the emergence of national identity in the art of Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century have focused primarily on the cultural and administrative impact of large, centralized empires. Models of 'ethnic nationalism' as a peripheral reaction to the imperial 'centre', with their concurrent 'discovery' of vernacular culture and celebration of pre-Christian heroes, have been convincingly applied to neo-national styles in Poland, Hungary, Finland, and Latvia among others. Romania, however, poses an interesting exception. Politically independent, it did not use vernacular idealization as a vehicle for secession aspirations. Secondly, its precarious position at the junction of three huge empires. PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY combined with a belief in the Latin origins of the Romanian race, led, initially, to widespread adoption of French models in an effort to forge an internationally recognized identity. This paper examines a number of alternative centre/ periphery models in the development of Romanian national expression through art. Paramount is the Paris-Bucharest relationship; it will also address the somewhat more ambiguous Vienna-Bucharest and artistically vital Munich-Bucharest links. Questions of how 'international' styles could acquire 'national' relevance are juxtaposed against growing attempts to explore the other, Byzantine, face of Romanian dual identity. Set against the theoretical context olJunimist and Samanatohst intellectual thought, these issues of cultural translation will be explored, in particular, through reference to the production of the lleana and Artistic Youth groups in painting and the Neo-Romanian school of architecture. 2. Alkis Charalampidis Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Modern Greek Art and the Centre/Periphery Model This paper aims to demonstrate the decisive impact of the centre/periphery model on the development of modern Greek art under the successive influence of European 'artistic centres', such as Venice, Munich, and - increasingly in the course of the 20th century - Paris. The priority given to the cultural legacy of ancient Greece as well as a series of internal crises inhibited the international presence of modern Greek art and impinged heavily on the latter's development and the debates that grew around it. Following the War of Independence (1821), the academic realism of Munich predominated in painting. In the inter-war years Greek artists in close contact with art circles in Paris imposed a reorientation. The paper will consider in particular the reception of Surrealism in Greece, as it exemplifies the application, and possible shortcomings, of the centre/periphery model on modern Greek art. Linked from its very first steps with national tradition in a mutually enriching fashion, forming a new 'Mediterranean' face amidst ideological and socio-political ruptures arising from World War One, the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the Greek army in Asia Minor (1922), Surrealism, more than any other movement, suggests that modern Greek art succeeded in fertilizing the various influences and in forging the characteristic elements of its own identity. 3. Pat Simpson University of Hertfordshire, England Gender and Identity in Post-Soviet Art: A View from the West The exhibition 'After the Wall' (1999) asserted that body-based art has been a major means for representing issues of identity invoked in central and eastern Europe by the geopolitical changes since 1989. This paper explores the implications of such practices, which seem to relate particularly to the apparent impact of the centre-periphery model on ideological constructs of gendered identity. Castells has argued that one effect of globalization has been the destabilization and disintegration of patriarchal social systems, particularly with reference to Eastern Europe. This claim appears to be supported by certain male artists' works which seem to present the experience of economic and cultural peripheralization as a failure of patriarchy. Yet there is both artistic and social evidence that patriarchy is still the dominant order. East European writers have alluded to the differences between western and eastern patriarchal ideology as crucial to understanding this apparently contradicting situation. This paper will argue that the most significant differences may lie in the endurance of Soviet constructs of the masculinized state infrastructure, the self-engineered 'New Man', and the ostensibly liberated and equal woman. Zizek has argued that such traces can only be eradicated by a new Utopian myth, focused on the state ­but the question is how. 4. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius University of London, England The 'Strategic Essentialism' of the Imaginary Slaka Malcolm Bradbury's The Rates of Exchange (1983), once claimed a 'penetrating satire' on East-West relations, is set in imaginary Slaka, whose landscape, architecture, history, politics, literature, and even language, are ingeniously constructed out of a plethora of the primary features identifying the 'essence' of East-Central Europeanness. The latter is defined by spatial indeterminacy, cultural hybridity, backwardness, submission, and an uninhibited desire for the West. Bradbury's novel of nearly twenty years ago echoes in East European discourse, which continues to construe an eternal and essentialized image of the Other Europe, producing, in Foucauldian terms, the object of which it speaks. But could the Western 'fallacy' of Orientalism be redressed by the parallel efforts of a new generation of art historical textbooks on an East/Central Europe undertaken from within? Could we disrupt the status quo of the Second World by turning to Third World and post-colonial studies, by merging the various notions of 'in-betweenness' and making use of Spivak's 'strategic essentialism'? This paper will argue that the most contested issue is the very methodology of East European Studies, laying bare both the traps of binary logic leading to marginalization and of the efforts to enter and extend the western canon. Diversity within East European identity - of difference imbricated with sameness - is a complex issue. A key question is how to break through the straightjacket of both imposed and internalized identities, while not renouncing shared cultural and linguistic codes. ABSTRACTS 5. Adam Jolles University of Chicago, USA Religious Defamation/Aesthetic Denunciation: The Emergence of a Soviet Museology under Stalin The Soviet Union's highly ambiguous relationship with its European neighbours during the inter-war period led to its being designated by the West as neither occidental nor oriental, but rather, as Luc Durtain put it concisely in 1928, as 'the other Europe'. A unique blend of archaic customs and radically new means of cultural expression, the USSR defied categorization among its European interlocutors at least until the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact. As a means of approaching the fledgling Republic's elusive status in the West, this paper will consider the rise of Communist models of museology in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Amongst the most highly visible and frequently visited tourist attractions in the major cosmopolitan cities before the war, the new museums proved to be a crucial breeding ground for the Western image of Russia as 'the other Europe'. The paper will consider the reception of the new Soviet museology among French visitors in particular, arguing that it was a predominantly French model of museum administration and pedagogy that was being shunned in favour of a more indigenous Russian model. Among the numerous species of exhibition practices that emerged in the new nation's first decade, two were of great importance: the defaming of organised religion in desanctified holy sites transformed into anti-religious museums, and the denouncing of artistic formalism in the installations tracing the cultural history of the proletarian revolution at the Museum of Occidental Art and Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and the State Museum in Leningrad. 6. Mathew Rampley Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland Warburg and Others: Art History in the Shadow of War In the study of German intellectual life, Fritz Ringer identified the 'mandarin' tradition as being central to the formation of academic and scholarly discourses in the nineteenth century. The development of Art History as an academic discipline was a clear product of the same mandarin culture, with its close ties both to what Preziosi has termed a 'museographic' impulse and to a bourgeois panoptic and aestheticizing historiographic vision. The trauma of the First World War brought about a range of reactions within art historical discourse. On the one hand, many art historians, most notably in Vienna, retreated into a nationalistic assertion of the specificities of the Volksgeist, while on the other, figures such as Aby Warburg challenged the mandarin basis of the discipline by emphasizing the dialogics of culture and by exploring the possibilities of a disrupted historical vision, culminating in his pictorial atlas Mnemosyne. This paper will consider the remoulding of Art History in the wake of the First World War, attending to the mandarin status of the discourse and the various movements towards a post-bourgeois history of art during the 1910s and 1920s. It will also consider the reasons why such early efforts to reorient the discipline ultimately failed. 7. Maria Go ugh Clark Art Institute, USA Lissitzky's Demonstration Space This paper seeks to reopen the question of Russian Constructivism's international dimensions in the wake of the archival revolution of the 1990s. I will argue that Constructivism's resistance to 'bell-ringing patriotism' (Roman Jakobson, 1921) is based not only on its perception of the avant-garde as an international aesthetic economy, but also its commitment to international socialism, to the spread of revolution abroad. But it is precisely this double-edged internationalism which has suffered most in the history of Constructivism's reception. In order to redress this problem ­which has to do with the constitutive function in the history of art of oppositions such as east/west, capitalist/communist, centre/periphery - I will unpack El Lissitzky's concept of the Demonstrationsraum (demonstration space) as instantiated in two galleries of contemporary, pan-European art which he designs in Moscow and installs in Germany (Raum fur konstruktive Kunst, Dresden, 1926; Kabinett der Abstrakten, Hanover, 1927-28). The Demonstrationsraum has been often misunderstood as an anachronistic and apolitical homage to easel painting. Based on original research conducted in Moscow, Hanover, and Los Angeles, my paper will argue, on the contrary, that Lissitzky's main ambition in the Demonstrationsraum is to resolve an architectural and political problem: how to design a standard or prototype for exhibition space in which the activation of the viewer would be secured. As such, the Demonstrationsraum directly engages - precisely within an international arena - Russian Constructivism's central productivist concerns. My paper will thus challenge the dominant view of the ever-mercurial Lissitzky as an artist disengaged from Constructivism's political ambitions. Like a Bat Out of Hell? Marxist Art History in the 21st Century Jonathan Harris University of Liverpool, England Christopher Riding Keele University, England This session will investigate the present state of, and future prospects for, Marxist art history. If Foucault once remarked that 'Marx out of the nineteenth century is like a fish out of water', then maybe the same could, and should, be said about Marxist art history in relation to the 20th. What agreement exists now about the definition, and purpose, of 'Marxist art history'? What is 'historical-materialism' supposed to be now? PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY 1. O.K. Werckmeister independent scholar, Germany Updating Arnold Hauser's Marxist Account of Romanesque Art Writing the pre-modern part of a new Marxist art history of Europe, I am obliged to take Arnold Hauser's The Social History of Art of 1951 as a reference point. In this presentation, I will compare his and my treatment of Romanesque art in order to ascertain how the Marxist tradition can inform art-historical synthesis. Hauser has characterized Romanesque architecture as an enforcement vehicle for class oppression by means of committing inordinate amounts of surplus value to art production as a religious sacrifice. I characterize it as a part of the production process and its dynamic expansion as an integral vehicle of changing social and political relations. I stress two aspects of Romanesque art which Hauser disregarded: (1) its drive at capturing the Roman ideal of monumental art in urban settings, linked to geo-political schemes of economic and social development; (2) its liturgical and aesthetic function as a disciplining tool of religious acculturation in addition to secular law. Since German emperors as well as Anglo-Norman and Spanish kings embraced both aspects in their support of big-time Romanesque buildings, they relate to the process of state formation which lay beyond Hauser's attention to class and ideology. 2. Deborah Ascher Barnstone Washington State University, USA Modell Deutschland: German Public Art and Architecture By 1987, the year Gunter Behnisch's design for the Bundeshaus was ratified by the German parliament, Germany had emerged as a world economic power and model of successful parliamentary and social democracy, with strong liberal institutions. German politicians referred to the situation from the late 1970s onwards as the era of 'stability' and 'Model Germany'. Although the notion of the Federal Republic as a provisional entity remained enshrined in the constitution, in the minds of many West Germans, the division of Germany was permanent at least for the foreseeable future. The new Bundeshaus design was approved because the parliament desperately needed modern quarters, and because no one anticipated imminent reunification. Then, in 1989. the East German government suddenly eased restrictions on movement from the east to the west, the wall was razed, and Germany began the process of reunification. In 1993, the Bundestag voted to move the capital from Bonn to Berlin, from the barely completed modern Bundeshaus, to the historic Reichstag. This decision posited a different image of Germany in the postwar era - a strong reunited Germany, confronting and living with its past as well as celebrating its stability. Where the Federal Republic of Germany was clearly one part of two, post-reunification Germany has had to reconcile the two into one. The architecture and artwork of both the Reichstag and the Bundeshaus were located in this political climate. Understood as the 'representation of the democratic state', the architecture and artwork for the two projects depict the subtle differences in the political identity of Germany before and after reunification. 3. David Dunster University of Liverpool, England Can Art or Architecture Survive Urban Regeneration? The recent flowering of Urban Regeneration policies across the Western world raises more questions than answers. What drives this apparent consensus; what equipment or processes are brought into play; and are resources available to achieve regeneration? To these questions I would like to add: what is being expected of the arts and architecture? Is it a blank chequebook or an empty noose? The techniques of axial planning and monumental sculpture employed in earlier centuries underlined state power, but there was a city to exercise power over. If a view of the nature of cities is emerging its buzzwords appear to be 'branding', 'best practice' and 'signature work', locating 21 st-century cities within the tourist industry, sub-branch culture. The questions will be asked in this context. 4. Stephen Eisenman Northwestern University, USA William Morris, Primitive Communism and a Dream of John Ball William Morris had a dialectical understanding of history; this means that he believed that artists, writers, and revolutionaries with a progressive vision of the future could profitably gain inspiration from a critical interrogation of the past. The idea of this was not to revive the past - that was obviously an impossibility - but to understand the peculiar nexus of community power and individual autonomy that made possible a former balance between nature and society. Only by fully understanding the past - and by negating the present system of unfettered accumulation ­could a new balance be established. The theoretical bases for this critical project were many - Rousseau, Ruskin, Engels. and Marx. Less well-known, but equally important is the work of the American evolutionary ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose works posit the existence of a distinct phase of society called 'primitive communist'. This concept was crucial to Morris in his own ethnohistorical writings, his Utopian fiction, and in much of his design work. A close look at a handful of works by Morris and his friend Burne-Jones. including the text and illustration of The Dream of John Ball, will expose the rudiments of this late nineteenth century dialectical and primitive consciousness. ABSTRACTS 5. Gen Doy DeMontfort University, England The Subject of Marxism? In this paper I want to look at possible ways of approaching a Marxist analysis of the self/subject, and how useful this might be for art historians. It's commonplace to read dismissals of the Cartesian/Enlightenment subject as autonomous and reactionary, whereas the postmodern de-centred and fragmented subiect is considered to be open to more radical development by 'marginalized' subjects such as black people, women, gays and lesbians. I want to question this conclusion, since I feel that this is an undialectical view of Cartesian and Enlightenment notions of the self/subject, and it is also ahistorical. In this paper I will argue for the importance of a discussion of Descartes' comments on subjectivity in their social and historical context, and speculate on their relevance to representations of the self in mid- seventeenth-century French art. I want then to go on to suggest ways in which postmodern theories of the self can be countered by alternatives based on a Marxist approach which, among other things, considers work, and not play (of discourse, language etc) as important for the embodiment and construction of subjectivity. Finally, I will try to suggest reasons for the persistence of so-called 'modernist' notions of the self and self-expression in art. For instance, in contemporary representations of the self in the work of black British artists, and in the work of Tracey Emin. These co-exist in dialectical relation with the drive to commodity and market the self in contemporary capitalism, both in the artworld and in the world of consumer objects. 6. Andrew Kennedy, Kingston University and Buckingham University, England Performativity Theory and Visual Culture ­A Marxist Critique This paper investigates whether there is a basis for a Marxist critique of performative theories of the self, particularly in relation to the theory and history of visual culture. In Judith Butler's work, in particular, performativity theory is considered to offer a radical critique of the powerful, patriarchal subject. My argument is that while such an approach can offer insights into the relationship between subjectivity and social/discursive structures, performativity theory ultimately legitimizes acquiescence to capitalist structures of power by positing an individual who is little more than the function of a set of power relations in a given situation. Such an individual would have few grounds in reality to resist such power, partly because s/he would possess no 'deeper', continuous self to be injured by it. Any 'resistance' that s/he might offer tends to be conceived by Butlerites in terms of play - testing out different roles in order to establish their fictiveness and to assert some sort of agency -a kind of decentred individualism. In contrast, the Marxist theory of alienation, at least in the work of the younger Marx, seems to depend upon some notion of a real, oppressed 'deeper self that may be fragmented but is not simply categorisable as 'psychic excess'. Moreover, it is arguable that a resistant collective subject, while not completely excluded by performativity theory, is inconceivable without some grounding in oppressed and (potentially) resistant individual subjectivities. I will, therefore, consider whether the related Marxist concepts of alienation and reification have any critical purchase upon performativity theory, illustrating my points by reference to one or two case studies in visual culture. Architecture, Society, and the Avant-garde in Post-war Britain Stanley Mathews Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA This session traces the complex and diverse avant-garde architectural responses to the new post-war consciousness of social issues. In the post-war years, architecture became the quintessential expression of social reform and aspiration for the New Britain. For many architects, society and the 'common man' became central concerns, and more than a few architects embraced openly leftist positions. In the early post-war years the social aspirations of the Welfare State found expression in two mainstream architectural tendencies: the Swedish-inspired 'New Empiricism' which sought to ameliorate social conditions by emulating a nostalgic and homely 'Englishness' of cottages and village life, and the 'New Brutalism' which countered the pastoral vision with a rigorous and starkly modern urban social view. Yet, the younger generation of British architects were not entirely satisfied with either of these alternatives, and began to view mainstream architecture as outmoded and increasingly out of step with the rapidly changing political, social, and cultural scenes. In the 1950s. various avant-garde contingents of English architects abandoned what they considered the aesthetically and culturally conservative orthodoxy of mainstream architecture. 1. Sam Gathercole University of Liverpool, England Still Thinking About 'Endless Architecture' 'Endless Architecture' was a notion first articulated in 1951 by the architect Richard Llewelyn Davies. What began as a means of understanding a modern building type became, over the next ten years, the ideology of a design process, culminating in the 1965 publication of a PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY paper by Llewelyn Davies's professional partner, John Weeks, called 'Indeterminate Architecture'. This paper will consider the work of Llewelyn Davies and Weeks between these two statements. It will concern itself with their identification of the need for a new kind of architect to respond to 'modern' conditions and 'modern' problems with 'modern' solutions. This demanded the wholesale reassessment of the architect's role by Llewelyn Davies and Weeks: they questioned the use and functionality of 'architecturally distinguished' buildings and stressed the importance of social purpose. Rather than seek a control system within a finite form, they defined an additive process, with outcomes never limited by aesthetically determined boundaries. Indeed, the implication was that no aesthetic judgement was to be allowed to interpose itself between function and form. This paper will set Llewelyn Davies and Weeks' work alongside that of contemporaries including the Constructionist group of artists with which Weeks was associated and with which he worked in collaboration on a number of occasions. 2. Jonathan Hughes, independent scholar Anthony Hill: The Intersection of Art and Architecture This paper deals with Anthony Hill's work in relation to an ongoing debate within the 1950s British artistic and architectural avant-garde about the scope for the 'synthesis' of art and architecture and the extent to which this was actually realized. Hill's work clearly stands on the intersection of artistic and architectural practice although his initial high hopes for synthesis (along with others at 1956 This is Tomorrow) seem to have significantly cooled after the 1961 International Union of Architects congress building. The paper seeks to consider Hill's stance (and his perceptions of failure at the lUA) alongside the work of his other Constructionist peers (e.g. Pasmore at Peterlee, Mary Martin at Musgrave Park, etc.), collaborators such as Theo Crosby, related architectural projects (e.g. John Forrester's involvement at Sheffield's Park Hill and Peter Stead's Neovision work with Stephen Gilbert - and through that to Cobra and the Situationist International), and the wider European Constructivist and avant-garde traditions within which the artists self-consciously situated themselves. 3. Barbara Pezzini The Goldfinger Collection, England This is Tomorrow: Erno Goldfinger, Architect and Art Collector This paper explores the relationship between Goldfinger's architecture and his activity as art collector between 1950-1970. In recent research I have studied the formation and the scope of Erno Goldfinger's art collection. On this occasion, I am planning to focus my talk on the implications of the change in Erno Goldfinger's taste, which reflected the transformation in his architecture. As it is clearly indicated in his essay 'The sensation of space' (1941), Goldfinger was aware of the interactions between the visual arts and architecture from very early on. This encounter was somewhat conflicting in his writings and works of the 1930s and 1940s, but found a synthesis in the 1950s. This new outlook stemmed from his participation in the 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow, where visual arts and architecture were then beginning to collaborate in a common aesthetic programme. My paper will follow Goldfinger's evolving aesthetic and reconstruct the circle of artists that gravitated around him. It will also identify common ideals and social striving in postwar art and architecture. I hope that this interpretation may be of interest for an interdisciplinary analysis of the cultural milieu of this period. 4. Simon Sadler University of Nottingham, England The Avant-garde Academy One of the paradoxes of the avant-garde since the Second World War - certainly in Britain and in the field of architecture - has been its sponsorship by the Academy. This paper will question how and why the alliance between academy and avant-garde came about, and whether the relationship has altered either party. Did the academy save the avant-garde from the extinction that it is generally thought to have suffered, and has the academy itself been transformed in the process? Special attention will be made in the paper to the changing complexion of the Architectural Association in London, in particular to its Archigram­powered 'Electric Decade' of the 1960s. The paper proposes that 'leading' British architectural schools conceived of themselves as laboratories in the vein of the Bauhaus, with a license to 'think the unthinkable' about the relationship between architecture, society, and the economy, prompting a range of intellectual 'schools' competing for the modernist agenda. 5. Hadas Steiner. School of Architecture and Planning, University of Buffalo Technology 'For The Birds' This talk situates the neo-avant-garde agenda as it would be expressed in the little architectural magazines of the 1960s within the politics of modernism in Britain as crystallized in the experimental context of the London Zoo. From the meandering Picturesque strategies of its setting to its modernist landmarks - the International Style penguin pool by Tecton, the New Brutalism of Hugh Casson's elephant house, the tensegrity aviary by Cedric Price and Frank Newby - the zoo's constellation provides both a commentary on the attitudes of the building industry towards technology, as well as on the more elusive cultural stake in negotiating a balance of fixity and impermanence. Mobility versus repose, transience versus duration, visibility versus spectre: this was the technologically-enabled philosophy that nourished the visual practice of the small publications such as Archigram, Polygon, and Clipkit. The syntax derived for these publications aimed, through a ABSTRACTS rudimentary method of mechanical reproduction and dissemination, to give architectural expression to the most extreme circulatory condition yet to be provided by technology: that of information as encrypted energy. Ultimately, the resulting vision of a post-industrial landscape, one in which the architectural domain was to be identical with that of information, would mistake form for content. As a result, the use of information technology in architectural practice, or 'Computer Aided Design', remains saddled to a retrospective typology still. New Public Art: Communication and Collaboration Jane Linden Manchester Metropolitan University, England As the distinctions between art and life are further eroded by contemporary trends toward hybrid and interdisciplinary practices, we are more likely to experience 'public art' in the form of an internet project, a time-based intervention in a shopping centre, or as inscribed into the fabric of the surrounding architecture. Working in this ever-expanding territory leads to a diversity of approaches, enriched and enlivened by the debates and issues that arise out of the new collaborations between artists, institutions, and the public. By bringing together a range of these key players, and reflecting on their mixed ecology, this session aims to offer some insights into the nature of these collaborative working processes, the resultant innovative arts practices, and the shifts in pedagogic strategies that seek to embrace and further inform them. 1.Jane Linden InSite? Out of Site? Obscure and Diverse Interventions in the Public Forum As an introduction to this session, this paper will look briefly at a range of art works that seep through the seams of, what we might consider to be, the traditional spaces for the siting of Public Art, and explore the often complex relationships they have with those that utilize and populate these public contexts. Much arts practice has spilled out into the public forum in an attempt to re-consider traditional, hegemonic, and thus supposed alienating conventions. The fusion of disciplines, blurring of boundaries between art and life, and the move towards a more active relationship between art and audience, have contributed to the development of a wider consumer public. Alan Kaprov's 'Self Service', Nick Crowe's 'The Citizens', or Jeremy Deller's 'Battle of Orgreave', it will be argued, are clear examples of a dedicated interactive methodology that seeks primarily to embrace the audience or public as part of the art work - as part of the 'text' to be engaged with. However, inscribing the public into the fabric of the work suggests there is a secondary level of engagement - open only to the informed few who both participate and engage self-reflexively with the act of participation. This paper, then, would hope to raise questions on the value and significance of these relationships - both in terms of postmodern arts discourse and socio/ideological intent, how this impacts on the viewing (and often unsuspecting) public, and whether the arguable dichotomy between innovation and socially engaged practice needs to be re-examined. 2. Cameron Cartiere Chelsea College of Art and Design, England Changing Currents, Rising Tides: Charting the Course of New Public Art Public art in the past 40 years has undergone a variety of dramatic transformations and diversifications. In the latter part of the 20th century, artists from a variety of backgrounds began working in ways that were more socially and politically influenced. These artists do not limit themselves to strictly visual mediums. They engage in performance, intervention, and community actions. The focus of their work covers a broad range of contemporary issues including sexism, racism, toxic waste, recycling, multiculturalism, war, homelessness, and domestic violence. But how, with the boundaries of what constitutes public art being stretched to new extremes, will a framework for critical discussion develop? Public art is forcing radical shifts in preconceived ideas of audience, interaction, and social discourse. What are the criteria for evaluating a medium of such diverse manifestations? Do the more traditional evaluative aesthetic, didactic, and monetary issues still apply? This paper, which focuses on the work of public artists from Great Britain and the United States addressing the specific issue of water, explores several possibilities for developing a critical exchange and more inclusive conceptual strategies within the continually evolving discipline of new public art. 3. Michael Corris Kingston University, England A Modest Proposal for the Public Realm: The Niigata Culture Box and the Skoghall Konsthall of Alfredo Jaar The Bunka No Hako (Culture Box) in the Niigata region of Japan and The Skoghall Konsthall (Skoghall, Sweden) are two public projects initiated by the Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar in response to the absolute lack of institutions of contemporary art in those regions. With these two projects, Jaar construct a discursive space to consider the relationship between culture, place, and the notion of the public good. This space takes the physical form of an architectural site that is modelled on the structure of a museum or kunsthalle. Rather than reproduce the concept of a museum of art in miniature, Jaar proposes built structures that house a rich mix of cultural forms, PUBLIC ART, ARCHITECTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND ART HISTORY from poetry to contemporary art to objects of everyday use. The architectural form of each of these projects was designed to be resonant with certain crucial features of the place in which they are sited. The Japanese project is constructed around the idea of an autonomous, sustainable culture box. These structures are conceived as permanent sites of display to be administered by the local population. The Swedish project, on the other hand, is a temporary site built to house works of art on paper of young artists drawn from Stockholm, Malmo, and Gotenburg. Because Skoghall is a centre of paper manufacturing, the entire structure was constructed from local wood and paper products. The controlled immolation of The Skoghall Konsthall took place 24 hours after its inauguration, dramatising the lack of such cultural services in that locality. In contrast, the Bunka No Hako project is one in a series of twelve proposed structures throughout the Niigata region.The striking differences to be observed in the physical articulation of these two projects raises interesting questions about the terms of cultural engagement in the context of contemporary debate on art in the public realm. 4. Peter Mortenbock London and Vienna, England and Austria The Provisional, Phantasmatic. and Virtual Character of Social Space Our present urban environments are saturated with an increased number of purpose-built devices that guide us, record us, and know about us. While enabling goal-directed forms of social interaction, cities have in large parts become opponents to social practices lacking purpose. Within these conditions the art and architecture collaborative Think Architecture is working on a variety of research and art projects examining a breadth of performative patterns and strategies, in which lived space begins to unfold without being determined by any form of corporate initiative, programmed action, or institutional force. By looking at ways of rethinking social identity and spatial practice through performative acts of partial, impure, and engaged praxis the tradition of representational space in Western culture and the belief in the power of the signifier is shifted to a dynamic understanding of processes of writing and rewriting of space as well as of marginalized or trivialized discourses as curiosity, cruising, and sentimental identification: In the project CruiseScapes material space is turned into the visual surface of a new material structure. While material space becomes surface, imaginary space ceases to be a void. It becomes a walk-through body whose ambience can be sensually experienced and performed. The proposed labyrinth plays with the ambivalent and contradictory spatial qualities of temporary, abandoned and marginalized spaces embedded in the urban fabric. This coming together of spatial and social patterns, memories and fantasies in processes of disindentification and rewriting is often a characteristic moment in the conceptualizing of technologically informed virtual spaces. Hence, the enacting of cruising as a form of epistemic inquiry, as intended in the project, makes trivialized cultural practices and discourses permeable for the conditions of spatial experiences present in virtual electronic environments today. 5. Rory Francis Manchester Metropolitan University, England If This is Not a Pipe, Then What is Lost in Translation? The development of a critical language examining the work of socially engaged art practice draws upon a variety of models and methodologies. These are from disciplines often tangential to the field of arts practice. Artists actively pursue developing projects within, and from, other 'worlds' with differing agendas; local government, development and regeneration agencies, environmental groups, health authorities. What is problematic frequently is the translation of aims and intentions between such arenas, and the concomitant challenge to the development of critical practice of the artist. This is further contested when such projects and dialogue cross-linguistic and cultural boundaries as well as professional. Although the initial imperative for the artist may have been politically motivated, (a response to gallery practice and the hegemony of the art world), the challenge becomes one of communication and/or compromise. If socially engaged arts practice is contextually articulated, then what is lost (or gained) in the translation? This paper will explore the implications for the development of a theorized framework as it operates for the artist and the impact upon pedagogical practice. Examples will be drawn from the writer's experience of projects in Europe. Forums There will be one-hour forum discussions between 3.15-4.15pm on Saturday 6 April on the following topics: AAH Journals - The Future convenor: Shearer West AAH Chair and University of Birmingham, England Science Block Lecture Theatre 1 This forum will be an opportunity to celebrate the past and examine the future of the two AAH journals, Art History and The Art Book. The forum will introduce new members of the editorial teams of both journals: Carol Richardson, who has followed Claire Donovan as Honorary Editor of The Art Book and Deborah Cherry, who will take over the Editorship of Art History from Dana Arnold and Adrian Rifkin in July. These two will be joined by current members of the editorial teams of both journals. The forum will provide a chance to review the successes of the AAH journals, as well as to look at their missions, future possibilities, and the relationship between Art History, The Art Book, and the AAH membership. Following the forum, in the evening Blackwell are sponsoring the reception at Tate Liverpool to celebrate 25 years of Art History. Cultural Capitals/Colonizing Centres convenor: Fae Brauer University of New South Wales, Australia Science Block Lecture Theatre 2 Offering professional legitimacy, such cultural capitals as Paris, New York, Leningrad, Berlin, Cologne, and London were able to lure a huge number and national diversity of artists from cities as geographically, if not geo-politically diverse, as Algiers, Cape Town, Caracas, Glasgow, Krakow, Tokyo, and Sydney. While they were able to exercise a magnetic centripetal power as cultural capitals, they were also able to exert a centrifugal colonizing power as centres. In a two-way trafficking between centre and periphery, artists flowed into these cultural capitals, just as they and their art flowed out from them. While art acquired by these centres was circulated to provinces, colonies, and other nations, often-in the ethnocentric guise of the 'civilizing mission', so were artists in the hope that those at the 'peripheries' would become 'civilized' - inculcated with the centres' value systems conveyed by their art. Through art and culture, these centres then exercised an invisible, insidious, coercive power. By investigating the ways in which these cultural capitals operated as colonizing centres, this forum will reveal how cultural imperialist strategies deployed by New York during the Marshall Plan years were alive and well in many other western nations. Walter Benjamin, the Collector/Allegorist, and Art History convenor: David Packwood University of Birmingham, England Rendall Building Seminar Room 1 Much has been written about Walter Benjamin's figure who represents the modern form of consciousness in the city, but little about Benjamin's 'collector', who is a more shadowy figure. For Benjamin, the collector was a kind of 'allegorist' who rejected taxonomy in favour of a more fragmented and scattered approach when accumulating objects. What is the nature of this kind of 'allegorical' collecting: how is this related to the work of art as displayed within cultures in our times? This panel discussion proposes to consider Benjamin's ideas on collecting and allegory in order to address the following issues which are related to themes within this conference. How do we read ideology out of collecting? What constitutes a politics of the object? What is the role played by memory within a collecting environment and how does this help to produce history or repress the history of the Other? Speakers include Derek Horton, Leeds Metropolitan University. Teaching and Learning in Art History convening body: AAH Universities and Colleges Subcommittee Science Block Lecture Theatre 4 The Teaching & Learning Forum will discuss the topic of integrating first-hand experience of examining works of art and material culture into the study of Art History. This forum will revisit the debates on Study Visits initiated at the 1999 AAH Conference in Southampton. With the consultation period for the draft benchmark statements having ended, and the implementation of programme specification approaching rapidly, it will be useful to re-examine this issue in the light of these national developments, to debate problems and principles, and to share instances of good practice. Future Feminists - Feminism's Future convenor: Penny Wickson University of Birmingham, England Science Block Lecture Theatre 3 This will be a relaxed, informal space where postgraduates can meet to discuss their ideas and concerns regarding feminism and history of art and visual culture. The intention is that postgraduates with similar interests can set up networks of support, both social and academic, with a view to establishing a core of on-going feminist activity amongst fellow students. The aim of the forum is to provide ample scope for the discussion of issues specific to female and feminist postgraduates in a supportive and sympathetic setting. Special Interest Artists and Contemporary Politics Group Meetings convenor: Pete Seddon University of Brighton Rendall Building Seminar Room 2 This forum title suggests that art practice might be (as Jeanette Winterson wrote in The Guardian of 13 November 2001) 'a way of living in the moment while remaining connected to the past'. The day before this, in an accidental echo of 11 September, a plane ploughed into suburban Brooklyn streets. Coincidentally that same day The Guardian published the first artistic response, as opposed to journalistic commentary, to the bombing of Afghanistan: Tony Harrison's poem 'Species Barrier'. This poem, with its metre and alternatively rhymed quatrains, provides a concrete example of those issues of formal response, definitions of practice, ethically appropriate content and timing, effectivity, context, knowledge, and aesthetic pleasure, that cluster around artists who address or attempt to be adequate to 'the times'. Private life regardless, politics as Tom Paulin once wrote, 'is a rainstorm that catches us all in its wet noise'. This forum brings together artists, historians, critics, curators, all of whom albeit in very different ways have a history of considering politics and art as well as the politics of art. These are varied practices in a world where older definitions and understandings of both terms have fragmented and reconstituted themselves in new and ever more complex ways. It is hoped, by pertinent examples and different positions, to generate an open discussion useful to both practitioners and historians attending the conference. Speakers include: Jon Bird (Middlesex University), Andrew Brighton (Tate Modern), and Barry Barker (University of Brighton) Annual General Meeting of the AAH This will take place between 3.45 & 5.30pm on Sunday 7 April (members only), Science Block Lecture Theatre 1 These meetings of AAH sub-committees will take place between 4.20-5.50pm on Saturday 6 April. Universities and Colleges Science Block Lecture Theatre 1 The AGM of the Universities and Colleges section of the Association will include the following special items for discussion: 1. RAE 2001: the outcome. 2. Widening Participation in Art History, including: 3. Widening Participation at degree level. 4. A report on the 'Art Critics and Historians in Schools' research project: findings and recommendations. Art Galleries and Museums Science Block Lecture Theatre 2 Students Science Block Lecture Theatre 3 Come along and find out what the AAH holds for students! This meeting will provide a convivial setting in which you can discuss the issues that affect students and plan future activities. Any student, either undergraduate or postgraduate can join the Student subcommittee, so please feel free to come along and sit in. Don't forget that the Third Annual Summer School will take place at The University of Essex on 6-7July 2002. Please ask a member of the Subcommittee for details. Independent s Science Block Lecture Theatre 4 This meeting is intended to allow members to get acquainted, discuss the objectives for the group, and the needs of this section of the membership. Schools It is recommended this year that school members attend the Universities and Colleges special interest group meeting so that they can contribute to the debate on 'widening participation in art history'. 29th Association of Art Historians Conference: ARTiculations'. co-hosted by Birkbeck College and University College, London Anyone interested in architecture, sculpture, painting, graphics, design, puppetry and automata, material culture, the body. film, or in articulating about art should contact: Tag Gronberg. Department of History of Art, Film and Visual Media. Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square. Bloomsbury. London WC1H OPD, email: t.gronberg(« bbk.ac.uk. or Helen Weston. Department of History of Art. University College London. Gower Street. London, WClE 6BT, email: h.weston«< ucl.ac.uk. Index of Academic Session Convenors and Speakers Abasa, Susan F. 30 Gross, Betsie 38 Newton, Laura 41 Amdur, Margery 44 Hall, Linda B. 16 Opel, Angela M, 40 Anreus, Alejandro 13, 14 Halliday, Tony 42 Paris, Helen 26 Araeen, Rasheed 23 Hamilton, Rory 31 Parkinson, Gavin 32 Asbury, Michael 38 Harris, Jonathan 48 Parsons, Sarah 33 Ascher Barnstone, Deborah 49 Henderson, Kevin 28 Partheni, Chrissy 42 Barlow, Paul 42, 43 Henley, Joy James 17 Peters Corbett, David 38 Barnet-Sanchez, Holly 13 Hill, Jude 26, 30 Pezzini, Barbara 51 Bazzano-Nelson, Florence 38 Hill, Leslie 26 Pierce, Christopher 36 Beech, Dave 24 Holdridge, Lin 28 Pratt, Stephanie 38 Berreras, Petra 20 Holt, Ysanne 39 Prettejohn, Elizabeth 43 Bickers, Patricia 24 Homickova, Katherina 23 Quintanilla, Raul 19 Birrell, Ross 28 Hornstein, Shelley 36 Rampley, Mathew 48 Bodoff, Nathan E. 20 Howe, Kathleen 16 Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt 25 Bhreathnach-Lynch, Sighle 41 Hubbard, Paul 45 Rawes, Peggy 30 Brauer, Fae 41 Hughes, Jonathan 51 Rees, Helen 42 Buschmann, Rainer 29 Hutchinson, Mark 25 Riding, Christopher 48 Byrne, John 33 Imperato, Alessandro 32 Rivera-Ayala, Sergio 19 Caceres-Pefaur, Beatriz 15 Jachec, Nancy 17 Robbroech, Lize van 23 Candlin, Fiona 26 Jimenez-Bianco, Maria Dolores 17 Rogers, Jon 31 Cartiere,Cameron 52 Johnson, Andrew 44 Romero, Yolanda 18 Charalampidis, Alkis 47 Jolles. Adam 48 Rycroft, Daniel J. 23 Charlesworth, J J 25 Kallestrup, Shona 46 Sadler, Simon 51 Cherry, Deborah 26 Kennedy, Andrew 50 Santina, Adrianne A. 21 Chun, Dongho 40 Kerr, Joe 36 Savil, Merilyn 37 Corris, Michael 52 Lang, Karen 39 Schechner, Alan 32-33 Craven, David 19 Leja, Michael 38 Scott, Yvonne 31 Cunningham, David 27 Leslie, Esther 31 Simpson, Pat 47 Darke, Jo 35 Linden, Jane 52 Singh, Kavita 30 Dimitrakaki, Angela 46 Locke, Adrian 15 Sleeman, Alison 35 D-Gascard, Lorettan 35 Lubbren, Nina 44 Smetzer, Megan A. 37 Dohmen, Renate 15 MacLeod, Katy 28 Stara, Alexandra 40 Doy, Gen 50 Magee, Carol 27 Steiner, Hadas 51 Dunster, David 49 Malik, Suhail 31 Stooke, Andrew 27 Eisenman, Stephen 49 Mancini, J.M. 39 Tamaris Becker, Lisa 45 Evans, Lara M. 21 Martinez, Juan A. 13 Taylor, Brandon 46 Fitton, Ben 25 Mathews, Stanley 50 Thomas, Helen 16 Flores, Tatiana 16 McCloskey, Barbara 20 Trodd, Colin 42, 43 Forbes, Duncan 43 McGee, Julie L. 24 Trusted, Marjorie 14 Fowkes, Reuben 35 McGuiness, Aimes 19 Ursitti, Clara 26 Francis, Jacqueline 23 Merrell, Clayton 45 Usherwood, Paul 36 Francis, Rory 53 Mey, Kerstin 27, 28 Vallejo, Ines 18 Fraser, Valerie 14, 16 Meyer, Richard 40 Vickery, Jonathan 25 Garcia, Genoveva Tusell 18 Mitter, Partha 29 Voegelin, Salomi 33 Gathercole, Sam 50 Moore, James 40 Voyiya, Vuyile Cameron 24 Gelarden, Martha 46 Mbrtenbock, Peter 53 Wake, Eleanor 15 Gerin, Annie 36 Mosley, Joshua 44 Wastiau, Boris 29 Giunta, Andrea 13 Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna 47 Way. Jennifer 32 Gough, Maria 48 Murphy, Greta Jennings 20, 21 Werckmeister, O.K. 49 Green, Alison 17 Neil, Ken 27, 28 Whiteley, Gillian 35 Green, Judith 29 Nellis, Anne 41 Wragg, Sue 37 Zarobell, John 29 Notes BLACKWELL'S UNIVERSITY BOOKSHOP ASSXaATKW (»­ART HISTORIANS