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Picture on the front cover: Art & Language, Drawing for 'V.I. Lenin' by V. Charangovitch (1970) in the style of Jackson Pollock, 1980, Private Collection, Courtesy of Art & Language
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Art & Art History: Contents, Malcontents, Discontents
-A Senior Citizen's Welcome
came to what was then the Department of Fine Art at the University of Leeds in 1977, along with my friend and sometime collaborator Griselda Pollock. We were appointed by T.J. Clark who managed to get us both, though there was only one job, thanks to the Vice-Chancellor, Lord Edward Boyle, the only minister in Eden's government - he was Economic Secretary to the Treasury - to have resigned over the AngloFrench-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956.Terry Atkinson came in 1978, and John Tagg joined us in 1979. I'm still here, along with Griselda. Neither of us expected to be at Leeds thirty
years on.
Back then art history mattered. It did seem that the discipline was at a decisive moment, perhaps even a turning point. Something was at stake. In 1972 it could be glimpsed in John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Michael Baxandall's Art and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, in Kurt Forster's 'Critical Art History or the Transfiguration ofValues', and in the setting up of the Women's Art Caucus at the CAA; in 1973 it was there in Clark's Absolute Bourgeois and couldn't be missed in the prolegomenon to Image of the People, and it was there the following year in his essay 'On the Conditions of Artistic Creation'. In 1976 it could be glimpsed, again at the margins of the CAA, in the attempt to get the Caucus for Marxist Art
History off the ground and in the papers that emerged from it: for example, Clark's 'Preliminary Arguments: The Work of Art as Ideology', David Kunzle's 'The Parts that Got Left Out of the Donald Duck Book or How Karl Marx Prevailed Over Karl Barks', and O.K. Werckmeister's 'From Marxist to Critical Art History'. In the same year, a radical alliance between artists and art historians, the Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, produced an anti-catalogue to critique the Whitney Museum of American Art's decision to display the collection of Mr and Mrs John D. Rockefeller III as a bicentennial exhibit of Tlircc
Centuries of American Art, despite the private character of the collection and that it included work by only one female artist and nothing by black artists. They're just some of the examples that come to mind as I write.
Having given myself a few pages in this programme for some preliminaries, I find that I'm trying to negotiate the difficulty of writing what may be expected of me and writing what 1 think is demanded ot the present moment. I don't want to appear sarcastic, teeth gnashing and bitter, far from it, but these days, in the University, I feel very much like that character at the beginning of W G. Sebald's Tlie Rings of Saturn who is troubled by nothing quite so much as the dire responsibility of performing his academic duties, under increasing adverse conditions. In the dread fear that I'll write what's deemed not required and, in writing it, compromise myself in the most grievous of ways, I'm not surprised I'm bringing this to the computer screen by taking over the words of others. Sometimes, plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. Necessity permits one to appropriate the phrase of an author, squeeze it, make use of its expressions, put an idea sous-rature, modify its meaning while keeping the grain of its voice to structure and texture what one wants to say.
Of course, I'm aware I run the risk that what I have to say won't sound too many bells with the younger members of the profession - which is what art history has become, mores the pity - and that they'll take it for the disappointed moaning of someone caught in sentimental rapture of a moment long gone, of a time before they were born or just starting school. I certainly wouldn't want to be looking at the world through their eyes or through the eyes of anyone who thinks that all's fine with art history. Art history does still matter, and not in the ways that the present professionalisation - the institutionalised character, method, conduct and quality - of the discipline allows it to matter.
Writing this, I'm reminded - how could I have forgotten it? that there was, once upon a time, a route into art history from
The Dissident, Anti-War Tradition
Among Art History's 'Founding
Figures' in the 20tn Century
This paper entails revisiting the generally
overlooked commitment to pacifism and
anti-fascism by Heinrich Wolffiin, Aby
Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Edgar
Wind, among others. 'Radical' positions
like these were in fact common stances
for this key group of scholars, who are
always listed among the founding figures
of modern Kunstgesdikhte and Kulturwissensdiqft in the West. In order to understand better the distinctive character ofWolfflin's legendary Kunstgesdiiditlidie
Gnmdbegriffe (Principles of Art History), for example, we need to locate his stark formalist focus on the study of pan-European visual languages like the Baroque
squarely in the context of the author's own anti-nationalism in i9i3-i4.This book was written at a time when antiwar activism was illegal in Germany, yet Wolfflin's dismay at the militarism in Berlin (he was Professor of Art History at Humboldt University during this period) is a constant theme of his correspondence from these years to trusted friends. Grasping this point will also help us to understand why the Russian Marxist Mikhail Bakhtin could favourably discuss Wolfflin's 'art history without names' in the late 1920s as a point ot departure for some of his own work in literary theory.
Similarly. Erwin Panofsky s famous essay-about 'Art History as a Humanistic Discipline' from 1935 ('Kunstgeschidite als geisteswissensdiafilidie Disziplin') was a direct rebuttal to Martin Heidegger's essay of the 1930s attacking Humanism in the universities. The latter view was intentionally published in tandem with the official position of Nazi ideologues that Humanism somehow constituted a national 'security threat to the German people'. Another leading German art historian who did a critique of Heidegger's fascist predispositions in philosophy was Edgar Wind. Only when we revisit the urgent national debates of which these art historical texts and others were a crucial part can we reclaim a defining position within the discipline of Art History — ii position replete with important consequences for the ultranationalistic 'War on Terror' by the Bush
Administration since g/11.1 will begin doing this in my paper by following up some articles in this area by prominent C German scholars, such as Horst Bredekamp and Martin Warnke.
Alan Wallach
College of William and Mary
• TC 9/11: Once Again the Course of Empire
In History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs remarks,'We see the unhistorical and anti-historical character of bourgeois thought most strikingly when we consider the problem of the present as a historical problem! The official response to the events of 9/11 confirms a fortiori Lukacs' statement. The resort to theological explanation (the attack on the twin towers, it was repeatedly said, was the work of'evil doers who hate freedom') seemed almost deliberately designed to intensify the American public's sense that the events of 11 September had ushered in an epoch of fear and insecurity unprecedented in post-World War II U.S. history. As the popular saying went, 9/11 'changed everything' - even, or rather especially, the American past.
It is this sense of a pervasive and deepening crisis that brings to the fore aspects of the history of American art that art historians have for the most part glossed over or ignored. Thus, for example. Thomas Gole's Ccursf of Empire series of 1836, which was once considered the product of an eccentric or deranged imagination, acquires new meaning as a representation of the crisis of Jacksonian America. As a conservative or neo-Federalist account of that crisis, the series is nothing if not anti-historical; but with its depiction of the imperial capital at the height of its power ("la mode NYork', as Cole wrote), its indelible image of barbarian invaders putting the empire to the torch, and its vision of the empire in ruins, it casts the crisis in visual terms similar to the terms in which 9/11 has come to be understood.
Wednesday 5 April, 16.00-17.30
Hannah Feldman
Northwestern University
• Veiled Visions: The Politics of the Image after 9/11
This paper analyses the shifting politics of visibility and invisibility in the aftermath of Al Qaeda's spectacularly orchestrated attack on the United States, now know by the emphatically non-visual moniker of'9/1 ['. Indeed, the war that has ensured from this event has been one of images deployed and repeated on all sides: the soaring image of global economic domination and the image of its dramatic destruction; the image of young men burning American flags in the Islamic 'street' and the image of Hinus and Hispanics being frisked at airports; the images of torture and those of we-cast beheadings; the image of George Bush on an aircraft carrier and the conspicuous absent images of the dead. As art historians in the post-9/11, post-Abu
Cihraib West, we must ask how the spectaculariry of this war necessarily inflects our analysis of the visible itself. Traditional theories of representation (both political and pictorial) depend on positive assumptions about vision and visibility, most of which are now-challenged by the state's power to appropriate images of rebellion and refusal for its own means and to police difference precisely through the visibility-ascribed it in a world of enhanced surveillance.
This reversal, which positions invisibility as a means to agency, has become especially relevant in light of such post97 11 attempts to ban visual signs of alterity as France's 2003 prohibition of the hijab or Islamic veil, from allegedly public fora.The implication of this law for French national subjectivity and its emphasis on the values of a liberal Republic need to be read not only by-social scientists, but also by those of us trained in interpreting images. To do so, this paper considers the work ot Zineb Sedira, a Franco-Algerian artist whose photographic installations probe the trope of veiling as a cultural determinant in order to address the difficult issue of formulating an identity on the cusp of invisibility and itinerancy. Sedira's work conjures the long history of Algeria's invisibility in the formation of French national identity, a tradition made all the
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Morbid Symptoms: Art and Art History after 9/11 and the War on Terror
more evident, if not visible, in both the French law of 23 February 2005, which legislates that the colonisation of North Africa to remembered for its positive contributions, and in the recent riots of
the Pans banlieue.
lain A. Boal
University of California, Berkeley
• Figures at Ground Zero
Haunting the spontaneous popular act of referring to the rubble of the World Trade towers as 'ground zero' is the spectre of the mushroom cloud. This paper traces the trajectory of the term 'ground zero', its representation in the Manhattan Project, and a genealogy that sets it within a larger historical canvas — of bombardment by weapons of mass terror
- connecting Mesopotamia. Guernica, Dresden, Hiroshima. Bikini. Philadelphia, Panama City. Kosovo, and New York on September 1i trl.
The referential extension of 'ground zero' from bombsitcs to epidemics, earthquakes and recently post-hurricane New Orleans, is considered in the light of Naomi Klein's analysis of'disaster capitalism'.The paper concludes by returning to the original 'ground zero' to examine the latest effort at representation
tn
in the aftermath of September 1 i . It is argued that Doctor Atomic, the 2005 opera by John Adams set at the site of Trinity test, is symptomatically misleading in the portrayal of its subject Robert Oppenheimer and blind to the real forces and powers that have produced a world where all can now claim to live at 'ground zero'.
Parkinson Building: Centenary Gallery
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
j Session 8 Old
Institutional Critique as Institution
Convenors and Chairs. Christopher P. Heuer, Columbia University,
and Matthew Jesse Jackson. University of Chicago
Various strategies of'institutional critique' in art practice -from David to Haacke to Art & Language - have themselves generated sharp, oppositional, and often extremelv productive analytical legacies. Yet art history has proven surprisingly less attentive to its own professional and theoretical realities. On the one hand, art history seems reluctant to admit that many of its foundational, and once'adversarial' texts (say those of T.J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss and Griselda Pollock) arc-now firmly ensconced as 'institutions' themselves, whether as features of syllabi, subjects of course modules, or themes of symposia and panels. On the other, the
capital-based realities of art history slashed budgets, oversaturated job markets, ballooning tuition fees - make it extremely difficult to speak of a 'neutral' institutional background. What are the implications of this condition for forms of self-reflexive criticism? Can we save 'oppositional' theory from becoming only so much empty spectacle? What are the historical precedents for these kinds of narratives? This session investigates the idea of critical discourse as 'institution' through a series of papers dealing with art, thought, and politics from the eighteenth century through today.
Friday 7 April, 09.30-11.00
Marek Wieczorek
University of Washington
• Critical State: The Forms of Art
History in Crisis
Hegel's claim that art had come to an end produced both a new kind of object and a means of approaching it. Art became historical and visible .L< art, detached and explicit, hence philosophical, yet at the same time a gap or conflict opened up between a claim to aesthetic achievement, with its own rhythms and formal demands, and the claims of social context and lived conditions. Institutional theories of art have aimed to span or obliterate some version of this gap, but are perhaps better taken as symptoms of it, as Stephen Melville argued. This paper will examine various forms of art historical discourse-that engage in institutional critique and that often invoke a crisis in the discipline or enlist art in the cause of the critique.
without, however, acknowledging that institutional theories of art are coeval with the emergence of art itself, that each resolution of the conflict is in fact a symptom of it and a replaying of the earlier (traumatic) rift. The term'critical state', borrowed from physics and denoting the point at which two phases of a substance are in equilibrium, applies to those accounts that purport to resolve and balance the tensions between aesthetic form and history — prime candidates for turning crises into institutions. Examples will come from the work of Alois Riegl.TJ. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, Griselda Pollock, and, most recently, from practitioners of so-called World Art History.
Malcolm Bull
University of Oxford
• Trust
This paper distinguishes trust both from traditional values and from confidence in social institutions, and describes the evolution of trust in terms of widening horizons of risk. In conclusion, it explores the possibility that negations of value may simultaneously function as invitations to trust.
Friday 7 April, 11.30-13.00
Eve Meltzer
Stanford University
• What is this 'Expansion' in the
Expanded Field? The Myths and
Manifest Destiny of One Art
Historical Paradigm
In her 1979 essay 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' the art historian Rosalind Krauss adopts the Klein group in an effort to define what 'sculpture' had come-to signify' in recent years. Explaining her method. Krauss writes. 'By means of (a] logical expansion a set of binaries is transformed into a quaternary field which both mirrors the original opposition and at the same time opens it.' It, in this case-sculpture, although the Klein group has been called upon to explain an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena within the social sciences, 'becomes a logically expanded field". By thinking sculptural practice in this way. Krauss submits, we 'gain permission' to introduce
Mining Building: Room G 19
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into our understanding of sculpture other
forms and categories — 'differently
structured' possibilities.
'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' was
included, along with several other essays
written between the years 1973 and 1983,
in Tlie Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths. In the
Introduction to that text Krauss explains
that she gathered those essays in the name
ot structuralist method, which grew out
of French philosophical thought and
deeply affected American cultural and
intellectual life, challenging the premises
ot historicism on which, as Krauss
submits,'almost all the critical thinking of
this country had been based'. Since the
publication of'Sculpture in the Expanded
Field', many scholars have adopted its
terms in order to examine and explain an
ever-expanding range of aesthetic forms:
sculpture, photography, painting,
architecture, and film, among them.This
paper considers the legacy of this essay
with respect to the notion of 'the
expanded field', its underlying structuralist
foundations and claims, as well as
'expansion' when it is offered as evidence
of and as a tool for critical art historical
practice.
Amanda Beech
Wimbledon School of Art
• Don't Fight It:
The Embodiment of Critique
Following the postmodern pragmatism of Stanley Fish (with the attitude that there's no such thing as a theory of critique and it's a good thing too), this paper tackles art's embodiment of critique from the perspective of contemporary art and cultural production in order to understand critical performances today.
This paper looks to art's ability to perform critique powerfully and contingently under the circumstances ot the institutionalisation of critique. Here. I argue against theories and strategies ot critique as opposition, claiming that the (modernist) demand for a dialectical self-reflexive criticism as means to attend to the institutionalisation of critique, relies upon a myth of rationalist proceduralism that not only makes critique a tragic narrative, but also a farce. This paper
ACADEMIC SESSIONS 39
00
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w
. been strangely neglected in mainstream academic art history. Hillers practice stages provocative intertextual encounters between postminimalism
(from which it borrows the equable-
display format of the grid), cultural
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
anthropology (by invoking its systematic methods of documentation), and psychoanalysis (whose archaeological investigations it mimics in its attempt to unearth censored strata of cultural signification). More importantly, the artist's work avoids being 'tied illustrationatty to theory' to generate instead a reciprocally critical, problematising and elucidating confrontation between theory and practice. Although Hiller's work is mediated by second-wave feminism's fraught but fertile dialogue with psychoanalysis, it also exceeds it. While also 'still working on the subject' (to evoke Griselda Pollock's review of psychoanalytic feminist art theory and practice), Hiller's strategic dissemination of the location of the subject disrupts the
foundational duality of self/selfsame and other, on which so much feminist psychoanalytic theory still hinges. Departing from the view that Hiller deliberately empties out her art of the subject. I will argue that her persistent foregrounding of hallucinatory states, hauntings and voices of the dead suggests a different form of approaching subjectivity, where the calculated figuration of the artist as medium (reminiscent of but not the same as Surrealism's artist-as-alchemist and artist-as-shaman) comes close to sublating another central duality, that of the analyst and the analysand. Drawing on Jean Laplanche's work on time and the other. I will explore how lending our ears to the dead through Hiller's work may prove mutually transformative for art and psychoanalysis alike.
Thursday 6 April, 11.00-12.30
Jo Applin
University of York
• Towards a Haunted Art History? Abraham and Torok's 'Phantom Effect'
In this paper I suggest that the theoretical work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok provides an alternative theoretical structure for re-thinking modern art's histories. By now it is a commonplace to argue for discontinuity and rupture as productive modes of
encounter with, and explanations of, narrative and subjectivity in historical texts. However, the work of Abraham and Torok gives a fresh perspective on these issues. I take Abraham and Torok's theorisation of the 'transgenerational phantom' as a starting point for thinking through patterns of influence, historical genealogy and narrative in post-war artistic practice. Through this I suggest alternative ways of thinking about sculpture in the 1960s that draw on psychoanalytic theories of incorporation, haunting and secrecy.
Recent writers have compellingly argued that the history of Modernism is one shot through with instances of return, repetition, blind spots and rupture. Abraham wrote that the phantom 'gives rise to endless repetition and, more often than not, eludes rationalisation', a seemingly apt description of many avantgarde practices. M y claim is not only to designate seemingly anomalous artists as Modernism's 'phantoms'. Rather, what the 'phantom effect' allows for is a tentative systematisation of that moment of sculptural production in the sixties which puts pressure on the standard narratives, emphasising the role of secrecy and return as explanations for, if not answers to, those gaps and breaks that such narratives reveal.
Paula Smithard
University of the Arts,
London/University of Manchester
• Psychoanalysis and Art History:
Re-reading Helen Chadwick
This paper explores the relationship between psychoanalysis, art and art history through a case study that reexamines the discourses surrounding the work of the artist Helen Chadwick in the 1980s and into the early 1990s.The writings of Julia Kristeva were important to Chadwick in the production of her work during this time and indeed she had directed a number of critics towards Kristeva's work. This paper scrutinises Chadwick's artworks and installations, the psychoanalytic perspectives employed by critics in writing about her work and the ways in which these perspectives have been consolidated in art history more recently. It will look at what is at stake in
the translation of psychoanalysis into a practice, discourse and history. The eclectic sources of Chadwick's works and their multi-media forms so often resist the ideological closures writers seek to place upon them. This paper will explore therefore, how an artist's translation or engagement with a body of psychoanalytic
thought produced a different orientation
towards her subjects out of that
encounter, through my own reading of
psychoanalysis, art and philosophy.
This paper is one small aspect of a larger study which aims to re-evaluate and recontextualise a range of artists in the postmodern period whose multi-sensory practices engaged to varying degrees with issues of sexuality, sexual difference and pleasure in ways which have been at times identified as ambiguous, problematic or contested for femimsm(s).
Thursday 6 April, 14.00-15.30
Margaret Iversen
University of Essex
• The Gaze in Perspective
Perspective, according to the oft-repeated
argument, consolidates a gaze that secures
the position of the viewer and stabilises
his sense of the world. It represents vision
as disembodied, making it seem
autonomous and cut off from more tactile
relations to the world. This has the
consequence of encouraging the illusion
of mastery. One important source of
theoretical anri-perspectivism is Merleau-
Ponty whose essay, 'Cezanne's Doubt'
celebrated the artist for his effort to think
and describe in paint a 'lived' relation to
the world unmediated by systematic
single point perspective construction.
Another source is Lacan's critique of
perspective in Tlie Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, which was taken
up by film theory, including Laura
Mulvey's theorisation of the 'masculine
gaze'. However, Hubert Damisch also uses
Lacan to quite different ends. For him,
perspective, like language, breaks the hold
of any imaginary, apparently immediate,
relation to the world and interposes a
structure. On this view, the illusion of
visual plenitude and mastery is not
enforced, but rather shattered by
perspective.
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Art and Psychoanalysis: Theorising the Spaces of Practice
Jane Graves Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist, London
• On Making Interest in Art a Psychotherapy
Interest creates space — a space where something can happen.The objects in the patient's mind are internal and intangible, whereas the objects in the studio are external and material. Both external and internal objects only create space rather than 'clutter' when the patient or artist are able to access and use the powerful and dangerous drives of the unconscious, (Eros and Thanatos) and bring them into the present for use or repair. It is the dreaming process which facilitates this enterprise. Condensation, symbolisation and displacement, the strategies o f the
dream that Freud identified, convert the unacceptable into an aesthetic pleasure, (lolcridgc's 'shaping power of imagination'.The elaboration of displacement, which it is the therapist's task to 'unpick' to discover the unacceptable, is the main focus of aesthetic development in the studio. 'Displacement' is the capacity to make 'interest' which may take many forms, the echoing rhythms of style, or introducing a pattern, which engages, and delights but does not relate to the content o f the object. But whether in the studio, or the consulting room it is only the existence of strict boundaries that enables us to make full use of ourselves - the creation of an aesthetic space.
Thursday 6 April, 16.00-17.30
Francesca Pollock DESS in clinical psychology (Paris Vll)/Member of the New Lacanian School (NLS)
• Psychoanalysis, an Endangered Creative Practice
For the last few years a fierce debate has raged in France. It started with a governmental attempt to regulate psychoanalysis: it continues with the recent publication of a book called Vie Block Book of Psychoanalysis, how to live, think and get better without Freud. Why is psychoanalysis so fiercely attacked?
My paper will give a rapid overview of the situation, and will discuss the ways in which a practice that cannot be
objectively evaluated is seen as subversive, a disturbance to the globalised, performing world. Using a clinical case study of a six-year-old child seen in private consultations, l will attempt to demonstrate how the symptom (as a creation of the unconscious) - contrary to what some believe — need not be eliminated in order to heal. Symptoms are not exclusively morbid manifestations; they are, rather, a more or less modest, more or less astonishing invention.They
are the key to each subject's solution. Therefore, the role o f the psychoanalyst is not only to welcome them as essential elements o f the cure, but also to restore to the symptom its creative force.
What is shown by the Black Book, recent political events in France, and excessive use of medication, is that we face the risk of desubjectivation when we attempt to reduce man to the status of a machine to be corrected, perfected, and
— ultimately — killed.
Janet Hand
Goldsmiths College, University of London
• Art-talk: A-Z and Back again
Through Psycho-aesthetics
I have become interested again in Psychoanalysis by its recent negation in art school education.This has to do with its assimilation into contemporary critical discourse more generally and the popularity of post-structuralist critiques of psychoanalytic orthodoxy specifically that have nevertheless engaged with some of its insights. Whereas during the long popularity of aesthetic theory related to Psychoanalytic hermeneutics in art school since the 1970s, it was important to be critical o f its orthodoxy as a researcher and artist, now I am much more keen to defend its place as a significant aesthetics when working with art students.
The question is how does psychoanalytic hermeneutics or psychoanalysis as therapeutic discipline help in the flourishing and interpretation o f contemporary art? This question requires us to attend both a diachronic and synchronic account o f the impacts o f Psychoanalysis on pedagogy. It also allows us to chart the impact of psychoanalysis on art education along with its popularity and fall from grace in relation to its value for art in general terms.
In the spirit of talking through psychoanalysis as a practice, this talk will attempt to chart my own and changing encounters with Psychoanalysis. Starting within the setting of a 1980's art school, I move through a complicated history. Ending within the setting of a modern art department, I attempt to provide an account of why an aesthetics that impacts on and is impacted on by psychoanalysis is very much alive. This is an aesthetics that embodies an interdisciplinary approach to art that is less concerned with redemption of artistic production by
theoretical means and more concerned with an art 'being-in-the-world' that is disinhibited from such authoritative disclosure. I limit this focus by drawing particularly on the rhetorics of seduction and the seductiveness of rhetorics: from performativity, through pedestrian confession to a new 'realism' in documentary that has recourse to affect.
Parkinson Building: Room 8 ACADEMIC SESSIONS
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
Session 15 Chemistry: Lecture Theatre D A Challenge to Ocularcentrism: Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery
Convenors and Chairs: Amanda Phillips and Corinne Miller, Leeds City Art Gallery
Leeds City Art Gallery has found that a number of its recent exhibits and purchases have presented special challenges to gallery staff and gallery audiences alike. Tacita Dean's Trying to Find Spiral Jetty (1997), for example, proved especially problematic for large-numbers of people who, coming across an artwork made of sound, chose to walk on by, disregarding the earphones. It would be easy to put this reaction down to the 'shock of the new' but the challenge presented by work like Dean's is, we believe, more complex than that.
How does a museum of art or an art galley accession an artwork made of sound? How do audiences feel and make-sense of an artwork that presents little or nothing to see? And what and where is the place of an ephemeral artwork in the collection? How can art galleries manage material and technological obsolescence?
This session focuses on the multi-sensory character of some contemporary art and exhibitions and their affects and effects on audiences and institution. It aims to explore how usual gallery and audience practices are being put into question by multi-sensory artworks. In doing this, it will consider the interface between the normal activities of the 'traditional' Western art gallery, its concern with exhibition, preservation and conservation, audience interest and competencies and the ever-changing nature of art practice. At the periphery of this focus, is the idea that sight, the paradigmatic sense modality and standard metaphor for cognition in the Western world, has over-determined
the modus operandi of the museum of art and the art gallery. By enabling and encouraging a challenge to this paradigm, irt galleries have made themselves a :ontesting and contested ground where lew ways of seeing', which is to say new nodes of understanding, can emerge, if illowed to do so.
This session aims to involve all those nterested in examining the social role )t museums and galleries, the politics of ccess and interpretation, agendas and •olicies set by central and local Jovernment.The papers framed by its genda address variously: the subversion >f the ocular by consciously multisnsory art; the potential of sensory-
experience within art galleries to offer new ways of engaging with the world; the perceptual aesthetics of affect through touch; contemporary art and embodied spectatorial experience; sixteenth and seventeenth century Wunderkammen culture, contemporary art and synaesthetic
experience; sound art within the
institution; artistic practices within city
public spaces; and through a reading of
key psychoanalytic text,'the antivisual
uncanny in contemporary art'.This
session will present individual case studies
alongside theory. Its speakers come from
and draw upon a range of contexts both
nationally and internationally.
Thursday 6 April, 14.00-15.30
Mike Stanley
Milton Keynes Gallery
• The Invisibility of the
Visible Invisible
Art that is consciously multi-sensory, that by its very nature subverts the hierarchy of the ocular, is implicitly a critique of the art object itself. It assumes the historicised and radicalised lineage of art practices that seek to contest the traditional notion of an artwork that can be manufactured, exchanged and consumed - it is embodied in performance art, sound works, time-based film and video, text installations
- practices that are counter-commercial, counter-productive and seemingly counter-institutional. In this sense, art that relies not on the visual but the sensory, or the cognitive, challenges and calls into question the framing or contextualisation of the institution. Gombrich declared that 'there is no such thing as art, there are just artists'.
Today, institutions find themselves displaying not just the objects artists produce but accommodating their very actions, their emotions, their thought processes, their gestures. It calls for certain fluidity in how we approach the interpretation and presentation of artist's work, and in challenging the boundaries of the institution it helps to make permeable the boundaries of the institution.This paper explores some very recent examples of contemporary practice-that, through challenging the
ocularcentricism of the art institution, brings the institution into a closer dialogue with audience and place.
Amanda Phillips
Leeds City Art Gallery
• 'Sounds like Toilets': A Form of Knowledge in the Art Gallery
Sense modality presents a challenge. Its central tenet takes us outside of what we feel we know and threatens that which is taken for granted, what seems 'logical'. Sense modality draws attention to knowledge and understanding, as well as the processes of coming to know. Locating the art gallery within what Martin Jay has called 'the master sense of the modern era' provides the ground for an interrogation of visual art in a visual culture.
This paper will argue that art galleries are permeated by ocularcentricism, evidencing 'the scopic regime' through reference to curatorial practices at Leeds City Art Gallery. With this established, it will interrogate a number of contemporary artworks that have destabilised its 'sightccntredness', arguing that in foregrounding non-visual sensory modalities some artworks demand uncommon forms of engagement from both gallery visitors and staff. Engaged uncommonly, or more frequently refusing to become engaged, visitors and art galleries it will show, meet with and use sense-shaped knowledge seemingly without form; without the backing of institutionalised status.
Such artworks the paper will conjecture, present a challenge to the primacy of the visual within Western culture and may point to, via Michel Foucault's 'archaeology', a new 'order of things .
Jackie Donachie's In the Arms of Strangers, Trying to Find Spiral Jetty by Tacita Dean and Primal Soundings by Bill Fontana, along with artworks outside of the collections of Leeds City Art Gallery, will provide a range of interesting routes into the ideas presented by this paper.
ACADEMIC SES3C-NS
Thursday 6 April, 16.00-17.30
Jennifer Fisher York University, Toronto
• A Relational Aesthetics: Exhibitionary Affect, Introjection and Distal Touch
As media of communication, art galleries and museums engage beholders not only visually and discursively, but also expenentially through a distinctly immersive aesthetics. Such an immersive aesthetics can be illuminated by recent theorisations of'affect' in cultural studies. Discerning exhibitionary affect elucidates precisely how display contexts impact upon, connect with, and are absorbed by the beholder. Affect is sensed percognitively and can be discerned in the atmospheric impact of the exhibitionary event, which is lighting, climate, colour, texture, rhythm, volition, proximity, mood and relationship.
In this paper, 1 will analyse the perceptual aesthetic of affect through an aspect of touch. While it cannot be seen, the space within, between and around the beholder can be felt. I will elaborate how such a 'distal touch' is embodied through the proxemic velocities, climate and intensities of exhibitionary affect. It is also this modality of touch that discerns energy, the mood of other beholders, and the immanent power of space.
This paper will explore two components of affect in contemporary fine art exhibitions. The first concerns the sensation of being introjected or engulfed by the atmosphere of galleries, absorbed into space, or becoming orientated (or disorientated).The second refers to volitional states that energise and connect the contingencies of aesthetic experience: the dimensional sensing of architectural frame, the force of the staged object, the proximal charge of space, the relational aesthetics of encounter. I will ground these two dymanics of exhibitionary affect with examples of contemporary art within specific art gallery contexts.
Lisa Slade
Monash University
• Strange Cargo: The Contemporary Art Museum as
Wunderkammer
Sixteenth and seventeenth century ' Wunderkammem' culture initiated a new sensory regime for the Renaissance beholder.The 'Wunderkammer1 as a mirror of the diverse and increasingly complex nature ot Renaissance culture provides a
useful way of thinking about both the
display of contemporary art and the
synaesthetic experience of the
contemporary beholder. Contemporary
art is frequently bewildering and
confronting and the beholder is often left
to make his or her own connections. Like
' Wunderkammet' culture, the contemporary-
art museum functions as an ellipsis, where
the beholder through a state of encounter
makes meaning.
In this paper, I will present a case study of a travelling exhibition entitled Strange Cargo which uses the conceit of the ' Wunderkammer' and offers a panoply ot interfaces, including a virtual 'Wunderkammer' and an interactive art trail, through which to experience the diversity and sensation of contemporary art and occasion a 'shift in the ratio of the senses' (James Clifford). Drawn from the Newcastle region Art Gallery collection in Australia, Strange Cargo includes works by emerging and established Australian artists: Patricia Piccinini, Bill Henson, Fiona Hall. Rosemary Laing, Hany Armamous, Mikala Dwyer and Lionel Bawden.
Friday 7 April, 11.30-13.00
Lauren Wright
London Consortium
• Affecting Atmospheres: Film and Video Installation Art as Sensorial-Memorial Experience
Contemporary art's challenge to ocularcentrism enables embodied spectatorial experience rather than a visual one. In this paper. I will outline a theory of spectatorship in which time and memory are central, advocating feeling artworks before reading them. Film and video installations that frustrate narrative and figuration, relying on hearing and especially spatial proprioception rather than visual perception, uniquely enable this approach by engendering what I call sensorial memorial experience. I will examine two works, Tacita Dean's 2003
film installation Boots and Darren Almond's 1999 video installation Traction, both of which provoke a sensorial-memorial experience, though in different ways and to different effects and affects. Both works' memory content throws the sensorial-memorial experience into high relief. These works and others call upon the spectator as an embodied set of sensations in time. This sensorial experience of artworks is also memorial: inherently and painfully partial, perception calls upon memory to complete it, allowing bodily response, as
Henri Bergson argues. This memory is virtual and represents the coexistence of fundamentally different durations. I will apply Bergson's theory of embodied perception in concert with Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of the Figure, a means of artistic expression that conveys sensation directly to the nervous system, privileging the affective nature of art over is narrative readability. In Lyotard, art is a site for feeling; in Bergson, perception is temporal and memorial. In the work of Dean, Almond, and many others, the multisensory film or video installation is a space where sensation and memory meet.
Aruna Bhaugeerutty
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
• Seeing With Your Ears: Sound Art and the Contemporary Art Gallery
It has always widely accepted in the arts that sound is a fundamental tool for musicians or poets. Recently, however, galleries have brought to light a relationship between sound and contemporary visual art practice, which some refer to as audio, aural, sonic, or 'sound art'.This paper will concentrate on the emergent genre ot sound art, which one might assume to be antimstitutional, but which in fact grew in response to museum and gallery practices such as installation.
Examples of widely differing major sound art exhibitions will be explored, such as a solo show (Bruce Nauman at Tate Modern), a group show (Sonic Boom, at the Hayward Gallery) and a live radio project (QSL at the embryonic mima in Middlesborough) to demonstrate how-galleries have dealt with this budding genre.These examples will also highlight
ACADEMIC SESSIONS A Challenge to Ocularcentrism: Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery
issues and concerns surrounding the display of artwork that exploits the auditory: this discussion will be complimented by results of research into the current opinions of curators, artists and visitors of art exhibitions that involve sound.
The analysis considers the role of the art gallery in the emergence and consolidation of a 'genre'. It also addresses key questions surrounding the practical implications of presenting the art of sound. How might one curate an exhibition where sound (as much as sight) is fundamental to the project? What are the most common problems and how might they be resolved? How might one integrate a sound piece into the permanent collection? And what might public reaction be to such an
unconventional display?
Friday 7 April, 14.00-15.30
Bartolemeo Pietromarchi
Olivetti Foundation
• Trans.it Direction
I will start from an historical overlook of the Situationist movement and its critics to mass media society, the anti-institutional and ideological approach, the relationship to the urban context and the notion of'derive', of'psychogeography' and 'detournement'.
I will then present the project Trans:it, a European overview of artistic practices within the city public space, in the frame ot which I will present some case studies related to the tradition of the Situationist movement and. in particular, some experiences that use different tools and a multidisciplinary approach to intervention in the territory. I will screen some short extracts (5 min.) from the Transit documentaries and explain the institutional framework and the international network behind the project.
The talk will end with a reflection on the actuality of the Situationist approach, and an open discussion on biennales and events, such as the Situation Leeds Art Festival, in relation to public cultural policies, image of the city, involvement of the public, institutional critique and contemporary cultural tourism.
Miguel A Hernandez-Navarro
Universidad Catolica San Antonio de Murcia
• The Antivisual Uncanny
Within contemporary art, we can find an entire series of practices that, by strategies such as reduction, hiding, dematerialisation or disappearance, work at the threshold of visible art, passing to the invisible and producing in the spectator an effect of deep blindness. This 'Antivision' happens in parallel to the denigration of modern ocularcentrism observed by Martin Jay in the advanced
tn
thought of the 2o century and is in
dialogue with other forms of rejection
to the primacy of the eye in
contemporary culture; 'Traumatic',
'Abject' and 'Obscene' art ('The Art of
the Real' in Hal Foster's sense).
Both strategies, the 'antivisual' and 'the return of the real', constitute two faces of the same currency: anorexia and bulimia of vision; a diuretic of the Lacanian Real intimately related to the overexpansion and opacity of the image-screen in Lacanian visual schema.
In this sense, these strategies introduce a reflection on the widely used concept of 'The Uncanny', but not exactly in the Freudian habitual sense, but rather in the reformulation by Jacques Lacan in the recently published Seminar X (L'angoisse), where the uncanny is linked directly with the concept of the Real: the irruption ot the Real in the Symbolic by means of the Imaginary.
This paper aims to reflect upon the
Antivisual Uncanny in contemporary art
as an access to the Real.
Chemistry: Lecture Theatre D
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
Session 16 Parkinson Building: Centenary Gallery
Kulturwissenschaft:
Aby Warburg and Contemporary Studies of Culture and Image
Convenor and Chair: Griselda Pollock. AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis. Theory and History. University of Leeds
This session is an integral part of AHHC CentreCATH's final research theme year on Memoria, Amnesia, Historia. Known through his more renowned associates, Panofksy, Saxl,Wind and Rosenau.Aby Warburg's own hitherto untranslated work underwent a major revival during the
1990s amongst German, French and Anglo-American scholars. This work was greatly assisted by Kurt Foster's edition of the first English translations of selected papers; Michael Steinberg's translation and study of the Serpent Ritual paper; Margaret Iverson and Sigrid Schade's work on Warburg's relevance for feminism; Matthew Rampling's extended intellectual histories ofWarburg's thought; and Georges Didi-Huberman's work on the central concept of time.
AHRC CentreCATH was founded to instigate Warburgian encounters between new directions in contemporary fine art, cultural, visual and art historical studies theoretically reshaped by new interdisciplinarity with anthropology, literary theory and psychoanalysis, whilst also engaging with issues of difference, racism and violence that were central to Warburg's own attempt to think deep continuities at the level of image-memory between past and present, high and low, elite and vernacular cultural forms.
Thursday 6 April, 14.00-15.30
Griselda Pollock
AHRC CentreCATH, University of Leeds
• Beyond Discontent Some Introductory Remarks on Warburg's Return in the context of Memoria, Amnesia and Historia
As a student coming to Art History in 1970. Aby Warburg was not a figure on the horizon, even though the works of his major contemporaries still formed pan of the preliminary, methodological and substantive reading lists. There was no course on art historiography at the Courtauld when I entered the discipline through the portals of normalised formalism and positivist revisionism. The transforming moment was the encounter with the social history of art and the possibility that informal groups outside the academy embraced to create both feminist studies and cultural studies through close study of a range of post-structuralist thought then disseminating through the cultural field via journals such as Screen. The Warburg Institute was the 'other place', not relevant to a modernist and certainly incomprehensible in its esoteric engagements with past intellectual cultures.
Puzzled by Margaret Iverson's invocation ofWarburg as a model for feminist art history in 1990,1 was enlightened by a small conference organised at Leeds in
1994 in which Warburg's historiographical standing was explored beside his own investigations into identity and positioning in an anti-Semitic culture of his own present. During the 1990s, Warburg has been reclaimed for Anglophone art history while also being re-instated in German through the restoration of the Warburg Haus as part of the University of Hamburg. The Getty translations of many important papers, the work of Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Matthew Rampley, Michael Steinberg, Sigrid Schade, and Georges Didi-Huberman converged during this decade to create a revival of cultural investigations into the work, thought and life of Aby Warburg. A complex archive, rooted in its own intellectual currents that expand the understanding of the turn of the twentieth century and its cultural revolutions (Freud, Bergson, Husserl, Einstein, Saussure, etc), Warburg's adamant objections to aestheticising and formalist trends begin to re-open certain key debates about the purposes, ethics, and indeed cultural politics of the practice of art history. What are the key elements of the project of Kulturwissenschaft that open up important areas for debate as art history, visual culture, cultural studies, cultural theory battle for understanding. At the intersection of feminist, post-colonial, Jewish studies of culture and specifically of
the image beyond iconography through semiotics. Warburg's practice offers not a new master-theorist to idolise as a secure guide to the perplexed, but a deeply engaged struggle to grasp the complexity
of human thought and history through that which we call art. M y introductory remarks will sketch some of the reasons that AHRC CentreCATH as a transdisciplinary initiative linking fine art, histories of art and cultural studies took on the question of the relevance ofWarburg's incomplete and foreclosed project of Kultunvissenschqfi as a research question for this moment.
Matthew Rampley
Edinburgh College of Art
• Art History as Cultural Memory: On the Actuality of Aby Warburg
The past decade has seen a considerable growth of interest in Aby Warburg. Tlie translation ofTlie Rebinli of Pagan Antiquity
and the ongoing publication in Germany of his entire oeuvre testify to the renewed significance given to his work. It has also been subject to new interpretations, which have linked it to psychoanalysis, anthropology and aesthetics, and to the thought of major social and critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Werner Sombart or Maurice Halbwachs.The questions 1 wish to address in my presentation are: what is the meaning of Aby Warburg's writings for a contemporary audience? Do Warburg's notions of Kultunvissenschaft and cultural memory still have resonance for the 21st century? Given his reliance on what now are regarded as problematic and historically outmoded intellectual sources, such as Karl Lamprecht, Richard Semon or Hermann Usener, what kinds of revisions of his work are necessary, in order to ensure it a continuing Nadileben, or afterlife, in the present?
Thursday 6 April, 16.00-17.30
Charlotte Schoell-Glass
University of Hamburg
• Warburg's Silent Struggle with
Anti-Semitism
Around Aby Warburg, both during his lifetime and his 'after-life', what could be called the 'biographical impulse' has always been a strong force. I wish to examine this phenomenon through documents that I collected while working on the Tagebuch der Kulmnvissenschafilichen Bibhothek
Warburg (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001) during the 1990s. Warburg's scholarship always was intensely personal, as the Tagebuch and many of his publications amply document. What struck me then was how later scholarship on Warburg had apparently cleansed his biography and achievements of one of their most
ACADEMIC SESSIONS • £
powerful impulses: his reaction to anti-Semitism, rarely publicly voiced but densely documented in the archive. These materials brought into focus how Warburg negotiated an identity lived in precarious opposition to being forced to take sides: German or Jewish, German or Italian, patriot or internationalist. The fragment of his picture atlas Mnemosyne may have remained a fragment after years of work on it precisely because the balancing of opposites as he saw them proved to be well-nigh impossible. In my paper I shall argue that Warburg's work and biography need to be studied alongside each other in order fully to be understood in their
import for today's cultural studies.
Michael Steinberg
Brown University
• Aby Warburg and Philosemitism
Aby Warburg pioneered the analysis of aesthetic form in relation to cultural life and cultural violence. As several scholars have argued |see Steinberg 1995 and Schoell-Glass 1998], anti-Semitism constituted for him a key location of that cultural violence. Nevertheless, some recent Warburg scholarship has worked, implicitly and/or explicitly, to disavow the relevance of his work to Jewish politics and culture. This tendency may be partialis understandable as a resistance to identity politics as a model for textual and cultural analysis. It may also enable the suppression of a key dimension ot modern historical reality and violence, thus itself becoming an unconscious party to the continuation of that violence. Thus the rescue of a Jewish thinker from the clutches of the
Jewish question' becomes an unwitting party to the revival of anti-Semitism. This is the dynamic of philosemitism.
This paper will analyse the silencing of the 'Jewish Warburg' in relation to the ideology and practice ot philosemitism. It will ask whether the cover of philosemitism, as one form of anti-antisemitism, does not in fact revert into its alleged opposite, namely anti-Semitism. In this light, the reenablement of anti-Semitism in the symptomatic guise of philosemitism may in fact exemplify a new form of cultural violence. In a more generalised sense, this is the cultural violence of our current age, ot the Bush Administration, where cultural hatred and malevolence claim the postures and legitimacy of benevolence and emancipation, where racism reemerges according to rhetoric of anti-racism.
Friday 7 April, 09.30-11.00
Itay Sapir
Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis
• Phatos, Darkness, Knowledge: Caravaggio as a Warburgian Painter
Warburg's history of art, in particular according to Didi-Huberman's reading, is a revolutionary proposal for the refoundation of the discipline on non-positivistic premises. It suggests new methods and a whole new definition of art historical knowledge.
Warburg's own implementation of his methods was, however, limited to the Florentine Renaissance, the period which, along with a new style of painting, created the foundations of the very positivisric art theory and history that Warburg sought to defy In this paper I will attempt a Warburgian reading of a corpus of painting that is in itself, I claim, a critique ot the positivistic tradition established by Florence's Humanists. As the latter tradition still seems to prevail in many areas of contemporary art history, the urgency of the undertaking cannot be overestimated.
I propose, then, to conceptualise, with Warburg and Didi-Huberman, the paintings of Michelangelo da Caravaggio: to see how. with his own Patlwsformeln, and in particular through his daring use of totally dark surfaces, Caravaggio suggested an innovative commentary on the transmission of knowledge in painting, and how the knowledge that art historians produce about Caravaggio can adopt approaches more compatible with the audacity ot the paintings themselves.
Caravaggio's Tenebrism will be considered both the symptom, in the Warburgian sense, of a broader epistemological crisis, and the formal pathos that could be the reaction to this crisis; as such, it may, read alongside Warburg's writings, suggest a new an historical ethos, useful for the crisis our discipline is notoriously suffering from these very days.
Siegrid Schade
Hochschule fur Gestaltung und Kunst Zurich
• Aby Warburg's Contribution to Kulturwissenschaften
I will focus on the term Kuhurunssenschoften and the contribution Warburg has made to it since I observe that I am doing 'cultural studies' or 'cultural analysis' all my intellectual life long, but that in Germany for example the term cultural studies has only recently entered institutional discourses with the claim to be completely new. There had been a reception of the Birmingham School already in the 80s.Yet in my own intellectual biography as in that of many other colleagues, specially women working on gender topics, other theoretical sources had been very influential, among them, of
course, Warburg.
Friday 7 April, 11.30-13.00
Davide Stimili
University of Colorado
• Aby Warburg and the Philology
of the Future
Because of the interdisciplinarity and
resistance to any academic categorisation
of his research, Warburg has been apdy
saluted as the founder and greatest
practitioner of a discipline that is as yet
without a name' (Robert Klein). My title tries to supply a name to this anonymous discipline. I do so by borrowing, with intentional irony, the title that the great German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff used to chastise Nietzsche's Birth of the Tragedy. Porter has recently recovered and prefaced to his insightful reading of Nietzsche's philological notebooks. DifFerendy from cither of them, however. I take the genitive in 'Philology of the Future' as referring not just to a philology that does not exist yet (though this does not mean, as Wilamowio implies, that it will never exist), but also to a philology whose object of study is the future. My aim is to articulate the dialectic of philology and divination that is, I will
argue, at the core ofWarburg's
methodology.
Discussion Panel including
all participants
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Kulturunssenschaft: Aby Warburg and Contemporary Studies of Culture and Image
Session 17 ison Building: Room 1.08
Taking Back Art History (But With a View to What?) Convenor and Chair: Donald Preziosi. Oxford University
Universities today are concentrating resources even more unabashedly in areas of research and teaching allegedly more directly 'useful' to industry. But what we may still call 'art history' was always divided between vocational training (explicitly servicing the museum, gallery, and heritage industries and their public, private, and corporate patrons), and the academic discipline, itself split between covert parodies of the latter or less coopted modes of research, inquiry, and critique - themselves, however, threatened with marginalisation or further integration into the vocational service industry. What's left to 'take back'? Did art history ever really exist?
Is defending (or re-imagining) disciplinary or institutional 'integrity' a mistake? Is the discontent permeating the field today the effect of an expansion of its object domain beyond recognition? A loss of identity and secure institutional 'place'? The result of an acknowledgement that the academic field's origins and professional missions were diverse and conflicted to begin with? Questions of its status, roles, and possible futures are inseparable from changing perspectives on disciplinary and institutional knowledge production as such. Art history was never satisfactorily-understood outside a network of practices
- muscology, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, art making, and the tourist and heritage industries - which taken as
o'
co
Art School converts philistines into
legitimate, authorised citizens of art. Seen
from a sociological point of view, this
institutionalisation of the individual into
art is an act of symbolic violence against
the philistine - both the philistine who is
converted into a citizen ot art and the
philistine who remains a philistine
because they have not attended Art
School or its equivalent.
The new task of the Art School is to rethink its activities so that its induction into the artworld is an invitation to the philistine to enter art's institutions as a philistine. Rather than legitimating students at Art School only insofar as they shed their philistine past, the Art School needs to think about how it can legitimate the philistine. How can the Art School preserve philistinism instead ot erasing it as a condition of the maintenance of art's institutions? How can the Art School learn from the philistine?
Since the emergence of the avant-garde, the philistine has found a legitimate place within the institution of art. Chance, found objects, deskilling. ugliness, popular culture and everyday life are some of the ways in which avant-garde artists have transformed art by infecting it with its other, non-art. The avant-gardist is an artist-philistine or a philistine artist. The philistine art school is a school of anti-art.
Friday 7 April, 14.00-15.30
Anthony Escott
Independent Scholar
• The Artist-Lecturer and English
Art School Change in the
Early 1960s
Set against a background ot post-war social change, the emergence of basic-design in the second half the 1950s brought about a major moment of change in English art schools. The First Coldstream Report of 1960 substantiated
these changes and the Summerson
Council convened in 1961 that
transformed the art schools.
Using, as a case study, the paintings and cultural context of the artist-lecturer Alan Cuthbert, a hitherto un-researched figure who trained in the English art school ot
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
the 1950s and subsequently became the head of the Foundation Course and Vice-Principal at Wimbledon School of Art from 1963-1979, this paper examines the impact of these changes in the London state-funded art schools, and the factors that contributed to this momentous rethink ot English art education in Britain. As the documentation of the art schools demonstrates, one of the important outcomes of the transformation was the expansion in art history and library provision within the art school signifying a conferred academic value, confirmed by the later move to degree status of practical art and design subjects.
The majority of art historical writing, has been dominated by the modernist model of monographs, movements/groupings, and periods. In placing the case study of an artist-lecturer in a critical and historical context, I map British art through the changes in art school pedagogy between 1955 and 1979. Such a trajectory encompasses three fields and raises debates about the siting of art history in the art school and art practice within art history.
Hayley Skipper
Wimbledon School of Art
• 'Cross Stitch & Conceptualism':
Topographies of the Creative
Industries
The Department for Culture Media and Sport include the following in their definition of the Creative Industries: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer games, television and radio.
This paper will consider the role of art
history in relation to the framework of
critical practice' in fine art and in underpinning/destabilising this framework. Does 'art history' (as traditionally taught in art schools) offer a framework for corrupting or subverting the concept of the'Creative Industries'?
Running parallel to the commercialisation of knowledge, the increasing emphasis on the creative and cultural industries and the role of innovation, an increasing number of artists, engaged in what we might term critical practice, are concerned with traditional art forms, folk and craft practices.
This paper will focus in particular on recent examples from the U K and USA, including Allison Smith's'Notion Nanny' project in which the artist 'travelled throughout England in search of traditional skills and revolutionary dialogue' (www.notionnanny.net) and Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane's 'Folk Archive', an 'attempt to collect and show folk art from all parts of Britain and Ireland' (www.folkarchive.co.uk). Whilst considering how these areas for exploration and research might offer a framework to question our understanding of industry, markets and art markets, this paper also sets out to examine how they might also bring into question a complex set of relations to the traditional domain
and reference points of art history.
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Art History and the Art School - the Sensibilites of Labour
irkinson Building: Room B 10
Session 19
Art History and Others
Convenors and Chairs: Will Rea. University of Leeds, an d Clare Harris. Pitt Rivers Museum/Oxford University
The histories of art in societies and cultures other than those of Europe and America have until recently been institutionally marginalised within British art history. This session explores and reviews the ways in which non-western art practices have been brought into
consideration by art history and other
disciplines. It addresses the ways in which
non-western art history has been
established outside the formal discipline
of art history, in particular through the
growth of interest in art by anthropology
with its insistence on the comparability
and contrast of practices across boundaries
that art history might prefer to keep
discrete. In particular, the session addresses
the growing salience of how paradigms
derived from the study of non-western
art condition the way in which art
history deals with contemporary artists
working outside Euro-America.
Wednesday 5 April, 16.00-17.30
Clare Harris
University of Oxford
• Artscapes: A Tibetan Artist's
Journey Through Three Worlds
Arjun Appadurai's famous characterisation of the global economy proposed a number of ways in which cultural flows could be mapped: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. Much has been made of this model, but it has yet to be applied to art. Appadurai's conception helps to articulate the ways in which persons (and their acts) are subject to influences well beyond the places they physically inhabit, giving due prominence to imaginative territories and their frequent disjuncture from the realities of daily life.
Arguably, art has always been concerned wit this kind of literal and metaphorical terrain but in the contemporary politics of transnarionalism these issues require further thought.This essay considers the career of an artist (Gonkar Gyatso) who has traveled from his homeland (in Tibet) via a key centre for Tibetan exiles (in India) to his current location in London (where he successfully sought asylum). In each of these physical domains he and his work have been reconfigured according to the cultural politics of local and global audiences to produce new ways of imagining the land he vacated, Tibet.
Michael Richardson Waseda University, Tokyo
• The Notion of Aesthetics in Documents
The journal Documents, published between 1929 and 1930 and edited by Georges Bataille, represented one of the earliest and most sophisticated attempts to bring together anthropology and art. In its pages art historians rubbed shoulders not only with anthropologists, archaeologists and others scholars, but also with surrealists. The journal was innovatory not simply in terms of its content and cross-disciplinary nature, but also for the way in which it treated what may be considered'documentation'. A notable feature of several essays appearing in the journal was an attempt to look at modern art 'anthropologically'. For instance, an essay by Garl Einstein on Andre Masson was designated as an
'ethnological study'.
In this presentation, I will consider what it means to study modern art 'ethnologically' and seek to draw out the implications that such an approach might have for the way in which non-western art is considered. More generally, I will look at the ways in which Documents approached the question of aesthetics and how it has a continuing relevance to current discussions.
Thursday 6 April, 11.00-12.30
Rebecca M Brown
Independent Scholar
• Troubling Modernity: Finding a
Place for South Asian Modern
and Contemporary Art History
The study of recent South Asian an is a nascent field, one undergoing some growing pains regarding its reception in the academy. Natasha Eaton, last year at this conference, suggested that through the contemporary we might engage students in art outside the European context. I find this compelling. However, in discussions and debates over the past several years, it has become clear that no one quite knows what to do with recent art in the subcontinent, whether placing it within art history curricula or even within broader scholarly discourse.
This paper argues for the study of contemporary South Asian art rooted in South Asian art history rather than in a universalising notion of the 'contemporary', inevitably centered on the Euro-American art world. However, maintaining the locus of the study of 20* century within regional frames serves to reinscribe their marginalisation. As South Asian art historians of all periods have often done, I turn to historians and anthropologists who problematise marginality and provincialise Europe
(Ghakrabarty).This puts scholars of 20*
century Euro-American art in a difficult
position, as the lack of awareness of art of
non-canonical regions reveals an on
going Eurocentrism. Moreover, this
Eurocentrism is not alleviated by
multicultural attempts to create
'alternative' modernities or smooth over
differences by speaking of the
international art 'scene', as recent debates
over the value of biennials have revealed.
Creating room for South Asian 20th
century art means, like feminist art
historians before us, troubling the way
modern and contemporary art is known
and taught.
lain Jackson
Liverpool University
• Documenting Nek Chand's
Rock Garden: Recording and
Interpreting 'Outsider' Art
Nek Chand's Rock Garden in
Chandigarh, India contains more than
2500 sculptures made from found and
discarded objects bonded with cement.
The spatial setting of the sculptures is
equally as important and contains
waterfalls, follies and amphitheatres, as
well as collections of natural rocks. Work
on the project began in 1958 remaining a
secret and illegal until the mid 1970s. It
receives more than one thousand visitors
per day and is second only to the Taj
Mahal as India's top attraction.
Despite its popularity, extraordinary
beginnings and sheer quantity ot work
very little academic attention has been
paid to the cataloguing, documenting and
ACADEMIC SESSIONS 73
more importantly the interpretation and analysis of the work.
This paper will discuss the process of cataloguing and documenting this kind of intervention, which currently covers twelve hectares. Equally how do we form our critique of this work? Most Art Brut analysis leans heavily on the biography of the artist with very few attempts at developing analysis from the 'data', which is regarded only as a product of the artists mind and not connected to a larger system of visual and material fabric. This paper will question that premise, and will attempt to develop new 'readings' by drawing on the recent methodological enquiries in the fields of archaeology
(Hodder 1995) and material culture
(Miller 1987; Dant 1999) as well as
collections and museum studies (Pearce
1992; Belk 1994). Contextual studies of
the site and investigations of the collated
data are both used to unravel and form
new links in the process and
methodology of art history.
Thursday 6 April, 14.00-15.30
Heike Neumeister
University of Central England,
Birmingham/Hereford College of Art & Design
• Raising Africa in Berlin: The Representation of Non-Western Culture and the Aesthetics of Carl Einstein's Negerplasik (1915)
XcgcrpListik (Kegw Sculpture) is part of the extensive oeuvre of the German author, critic and art historian, Carl Einstein (1885-1940), who was described by Robert Goldwater, Director of the Museum of Primitive Art (New York) as the 'first and most influential' of the 'champions of primitive art'. Yet in accounts of early twentieth-century modernism and historical studies of the anthropology of art concerned with cultures other than those of Europe and North America this book has been obscured by what may be a cultural politic of amnesia that even today appears to surround this first study on African art.
This paper aims to explore the reasons for this by tracing events crucial to the publication of Negerplastik the content of which challenged the hegemony of
Western art and its historical traditions, while being the first to propose a theoretical approach to an aesthetic of the African sculptural object as art.The paper will review aspects of Einstein's project byanalysing the books- visual strategies of photographic reproduction that showed
African works in more than one hundred
large half-tone plates. It will be argued
that Negerplastik fore-grounded a formal
paradigm for the non-western art object
that anticipated today's anthropology of
art and aesthetics. By engendering a host
of publications that signified the rise of
the 'ethnographic turn' Negerplastik
provided a quasi-blueprint for Western
perceptions of African art. Moreover this
paper will examine how the image-text
nexus of Negerplastik succeeded to re-
energise some of the historical avant
garde's appropriations of non-western
culture that ironically only corroborated
Einstein's critique of primitivism.
Will Rea.
University of Leeds
• Finding your Contemporary:
A Longer Century (of African
Art History, Anthropology
and Aesthetics)
This paper develops from the debates
surrounding Ewenzor's 'short century',
using as a starting point the relationship
he highlights between modernism and
modernity in twentieth century Africa.
At the heart of this is an aesthetic attitude within which primitivism develops at the heart ot modernism. Concentrating upon the ways in which the surface of African sculpture has been conceptualised within differing aesthetic frames, this paper counter poses anthropological and art historical approaches in relation to African sculpture and in particular to Yoruba sculpture.
In turn it suggests ways in which practice-in modernist forms of African art is in a closer relation to those forms (increasingly bracketed off as part of a tradition that is somehow no longer contemporary) than current Art Historical writing on the contemporary will allow.
Thursday 6 April, 16.00-17.30
Morgan Thomas University of Canterbury, Christchurch
• Aboriginal Art and the 'Ethnographic Turn'
The move of Aboriginal cultural objects out of ethnographic collections and into art galleries is usually understood to be crucial to the belated recognition of Aboriginal art in Australia and internationally since the late 1970s. I suggest, however, that despite its apparent refraining in artistic and critical as opposed to anthropological terms, Aboriginal art remains 'captured' by socio-anthropological conceptualisations. Accounts emphasising the breakthrough of this still recent inclusion of Indigenous Australian art in the field of contemporary art overlook what Hal Foster terms the 'ethnographic turn' in art itself, linked to the 'expanded field' of collecting and the global marketplace.
What arises, Foster states, is a 'compromise discourse' linked to the desire for discursive models offering means to negotiate the political impasses of the present.
What then are the implications of the 'ethnographic turn' vis-a-vis Indigenous art in Australia, e.g. in current usage of the very term 'Aboriginal art', or in relation to the differences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art? Can one discern a 'counter-ethnographic' turn in Indigenous art in Australia? With reference to work by artists including Richard Bell, Darren Siwes and Tracey Moffatt. I suggest that one can. I suggest, further, that the effect of the dominance of the ethnographic model is to render the difference between colonialism and postcolomalism academic. The aesthetic concerns of artists like Siwes and Moffatt give rise to artworks which are not only fascinating in their own terms, but also subversive in their capacity to escape the colonialism of ethnographic accounting.
Polly Savage SOAS. University of London/October Gallery
• Playing to the Gallery
What kind of understanding of masquerade can we expect from museum
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Art History and Others
and gallery displays? This paper will examine some of the issues raised by various methods of'exhibiting' masquerade. It has been well argued that exhibiting a mask without providing a sense of context is to obscure its significance in some way, to deny the history of the object, or rather of a type of objects, and to frustrate any understanding of the role of this type of object in complex dynamic and sensory processes. How have curators and
artists approached this dilemma? And to
what effect?
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
Parkinson Building: Room 10
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
Session 20 inson Building: Room B II Exchanges at the Interface between Art History and Philosophy
Convenor and Chair: Katerina Reed-Tsocha. Trinity College. University of Oxford
As art history continues to be characterised by reflexivity, reflecting upon questions of methodology, objectives and scope, can philosophy point to some new directions? Once associated with the 'heroic phase' of the discipline, the Kantian and Hegelian legacies can be fruitfully re-examined, in particular in the aftermath of debates surrounding formalism. Are there remaining important questions to be asked within this philosophical framework? And is there restorative work that needs to be undertaken, leading to a richer understanding of this tradition
of thought, which has often been subjected to oversimplification and distortion? Furthermore, is it conceivable that the methodological cross-fertilisation of the discipline has led to diversification and fragmentation to such an extent that a return to a unifying discourse on method - pluralistic rather than monolithic - could, rather against the odds, prove constructive? And would such an endorsement of reflection at a metalevel, not entangled in ideological struggles, identify a standpoint at all feasible or desirable?
This session explores and re-evaluates the post-Kantian philosophical contribution to art history, and attempts to forge links to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy and its characteristic-preoccupation with second-order theoretical investigation.The common ground between the papers addressing these two different schools of thought is provided by emphasis on methodological issues.
Thursday 6 April, 11.00-12.30
Michael Podro
University of Essex
• Philosophy in Critical Practice
We read past writings on aesthetics partly out of a historical concern, either for the history of ideas or for the history of art; but we also examine them with a different purpose, because they continue to play a part in current thinking and we may want to make that part clearer and even enhance it. The vocabulary we use now is continuous with the vocabulary of past writers, our own thinking makes
more of less implicit reference to viewpoints formed in the past however imprecise our awareness of them may be. But past theorising has a potentiality for the present beyond any already accrued indebtedness. We return to it to provide different perspectives on issues that remain - if not absolutely constant recurrent; issues that we might think arc-too central and too complex ever to be comprehensively grasped.We look at past theories critically but also to throw light on each other and on views we now hold, and when we find what seem to be very similar issues in very different
conceptual contexts our thought can on occasion released from the rigidities of a specific idiom or focus (particularly our own) by virtue of the comparison.
This might seem to leave such theorising and criticism without effective constraint, without any test of objectivity or truth, simply moving between convergent and divergent theories. But constraint is provided by the demand tor relevance. Being relative in this sense does not make its truth relative but its relevance relative. In criticism or argument, insofar as it pays its way, there is an assumption on the part of the speaker of what needs saying in the context ot those who form the community of discussion.
Patrycja Kaszynska
Christ Church, University of Oxford
• Must We Apologise for Talking Painting? A Philosopher's Insight into the Foundation of Art History
Paul Valery declared that, 'we must always apologise for talking painting'. Art History violates this insight. Its rnison d'etre is precisely to give a narrative, linguistic account of art. Should then art historians concede that their entire discipline is grounded in a faux pas, as Valery suggested? What reasons are there for thinking that there is something problematic about 'talking art'? These questions concern the foundations of the art historical discourse, but are rarely addressed by art historians. In my paper, I suggest that these questions are a locus of'exchange' between art history and philosophy.
The problem of relating the aesthetic and the conceptual dimension and thus, 'translating' the medium of art into conceptual form has been a central concern ofTheodor Adorno.This is nowhere more evident than in the motto for his magnum opus, Aesthetic Theory, which is the quotation from Friedrich Schlegel: 'What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one ot two things; either the philosophy or the art.' In my paper I reconstruct Adorno's struggle to define an approach that would preserve both, art and philosophy. I outline his reasons for
thinking why, one the one hand, to talk about art would seem inappropriate, but also, on the other hand, why one should not abandon the project of conceptualising art as misguided or futile. In fact, I suggest that, Adorno's thesis that art has a form immanent cognitive-content with a non-propositional character is perhaps a way of reconciling the position ofValery with that of an art historian.
Thursday 6 April, 14.00-15.30
Dorit Barchana-Lorand
The University of Haifa/Beit Berl College
School of Art
• Whose Formalism? Kant's Theory
of Art Re-Examined
Kant is generally regarded as a strict
formalist, famously claiming that when
we judge an object aesthetically we need
only see whether the 'mere presentation
of the object is accompanied by a liking,
no matter how indifferent [we] may be-
about the existence of the object of this
presentation' {Critique ofJudgment section
2). However, I will argue that despite the
'mere presentation' thesis, Kant is not a
strict formalist when art is concerned.
More specifically, I will look into the
criteria Kant sets for identifying and
evaluating works of art in the Critique of
Judgment, and show that in sharp contrast
to the formalist image of Kant's aesthetics,
these criteria are based mostly on the
context of the work. Section 43 provides
the gist of these criteria in the form ot
three opposites of art: nature, science, and
craftsmanship. The sensitivity to context
in Kant's theory provides coherent
reasoning for the distinctions we make
ACADEMIC SESSIONS 77
between objects of art and non-art, even where there's similarity in appearance. This serves as a strong argument against the formalist interpretation of Kant's theory of art. Throughout the discussion, the application of Kant's theory to current dilemmas in the art world serves to illustrate its relevance to contemporary art.
Frederic J. Schwartz
University College London
• Art History at an Impasse: The 1920s and 30s
By the early 1920s, the academic history of art in the German-speaking world seemed at last to rest upon firm foundations. The generation of the Riegl, Wolfflin and others had left the field with a high degree of both visibility and prestige, and scholars have recently studied this period in terms of the 'new self-regard of the discipline' (Christopher Wood). Yet the institutional successes of the field stood in stark contrast to intellectual problems that threatened to undermine the bases of the discipline as they had been established by the preceding generations. Philosophically astute art historians, challenging the idealist and formalist premises of academic art history, regularly called the
Kantian and Hegelian foundations of the discipline into question. At the same time, there was a consensus that the historicism ot the human sciences was in crisis. This paper will consider interventions within the field and critiques from outside as a way to survey a discipline that was, in many ways, at an impasse.
Thursday 6 April, 16.00-17.30
Jason Gaiger
The Open University
• 'Free, Formative Activity': Kant, Fiedler and the Philosophical Foundations of Art History
The idea of'pure visibility' developed by the German philosopher Konrad Fiedler (1841-1895) played a central role in the attempt to establish art history as a Kunstwissenschaft, or'science of art'. If art history was to be more than a descriptive enterprise, collating and verifying information about the lives and works of
artists, it needed to establish its own protocols and its own proper domain of enquiry. Fiedler's theory of pure visibility appeared to offer a secure basis on which to establish the distinctive character of the visual arts and, by extension, the methods employed in their study. Setting himself against the dominant identification of aesthetics with the subjective responses of the viewer or spectator -a dominance that had in large part been established byKant's Critique ofJudgment - Fiedler was primarily concerned with the production of art rather than its reception. After some preliminary remarks, the main body of
the paper is devoted to a critical assessment of the plausibility and coherence of Fiedler's views, focussing in particular on his claim that the faculty of sensibility, and not just the faculty of understanding, is active or 'spontaneous'. I show where he departs from or revises Kant's arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason and consider the upshot of these revisions for his theory of art as 'free, formative activity'. 1 conclude by relating this discussion to recent debates on non-conceptual content and offer a measured defence of Fiedler's position.
Kaarina-Nancy Bauer
Architectural Association. London
• Heinrich Wolfflin
-A Philosopher of Art History
One of the grandfathers of academic art history, Heinrich Wolfflin, received his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1886 in the subject of philosophy. Most critics consider his dissertation,
Prolegomena to J Psychology of Architecture,
juvenile wanderings before he found his place as respectable art historian so-tospeak, teaching at the universities of Basel, Berlin. Munich and Zurich, and writing on the periods of the Renaissance and the Baroque. This paper seeks to reexamine Wolfflin's dissertation and its continued relevance on his subsequent writing and thinking, in order to restore and emphasise Wolfflin's image as theorist and philosopher of art history.
In presenting the various philosophical and aesthetic implications from Kant. Hegel and Schopenhauer, which Wolfflin embraced to develop his theories about history, art and culture, as well as form
and matter, Wolfflin himself can be regarded as positioned at the interface between art history and philosophy. With methodologies borrowed from philology and psychology, apart from philosophy, he offered notions about style and periodisation, and indeed, with his most well known book, Principles of Art History' (1915), an implicit philosophical conception and grounding of the discipline of art history. Wolfflin, as philosopher of art history, embodies and reveals the relevance of philosophical thinking within the sphere of academic art history, and the need to
engage students and ourselves in this
critical issue.
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Exchanges at the Interface between Art History and Philosophy
Session 21 Parkinson Building: Room B 8 Does Art History Have A Future?
Convenor and Chair: Margherita Sprio, University of Essex
Is it really over for the discipline of Art History? If so, on what evidence do we come to this conclusion? The rise of cyber and digital culture has changed the way that we experience the world. The Art History versus Visual Culture axis is thought by some to be a factor in the final decline of Art History. The overlapping of related disciplines within university departments, which increasingly finds the study o f art and its history to be located within non Art
History departments, could also be said to have aided the demise o f the stable category that was once known as 'Art History'.
Recruitment for both graduate and undergraduate courses appears to be in crisis. The AA H has seen its membership and the numbers attending its annual conference decline. Many important thinkers working within the broad sphere of visual culture would never associate themselves with 'Art History'. Why? In private, many colleagues are resigned to the death o f the discipline. Wh y are they so pessimistic? Many o f the great voices of British Art History are coming to the end o f their academic careers. Is their old age reflected in this lack o f enthusiasm?
Have they become disillusioned with
what Art History has become? How
much is their mourning linked to wider
issues implicated in the death of the
intellectual?
To what extent is Art History only one academic discipline alongside many that are also thought to be in decline? Does the contemporary information age actively do away with earlier modes of study only to replace it with other, more plural versions that will enable another kind of discipline? Are we merely experiencing a moment of change - out with the old and in with something new? Does Art History have a future? Does the history of art have any life left in it? Can we foresee a different kind of discipline and. if so. what might this 'new look" discipline of An History consist of? What might it be able to contribute? Papers in this panel will be presented from a diverse-range o f positions and it is hoped that some of the questions raised will be able to breath a new philosophical life into an old discipline.
Friday 7 April, 09.30-11.00
Loretta Vandi
Istituto Statale a"Arte, Riccione
• Gombrich's Legacy: Art History as Embodiment of Values
I would like to answer this question in the positive and in order to dig out right away as much as possible (I am alluding here to my own possibilities) the core of Art History - the system of Tradition -I will attempt to track down the real legacy of Combrich's theory on art and on the role o f critics and historians o f art, grounding my discussion on the Gombrichian premises that art is an embodiment o f values and that art historians and critics are concerned with the creation o f canons.
Since the contraposition between representational-non representational art is, in my opinion, a misleading problem and since the topic o f representation - in its visual and verbal terms - is still an open issue to be faced, we have to clarify our own values - and here I believe that art historians and critics have much yet to discuss keeping alive their readiness, involvement, and detachment - i f we want to experience a work of art as something worth for us and for the reader-hearer-beholder alike.
Analysing a momentous series o f dualisms (Gombrich's norm and form, Alpers' renaissance absolute canon and northern relative canon, Baxandall's descriptive criticism and inferential criticism) eventually, because there remain indeed some floating questions followed closely with the surfacing of new ones, I will come to adumbrate my own suggestions about historical and critical understanding.
Gavin Butt
Goldsmiths College, University of London
• Is There Life in Art History?
Art History, as a discipline, bears an
abiding relationship to narratives o f lives
lived - o f artist's lives - ever since the
writings of Giorgio Vasari. It has also,
more recently, found itself pressured by
the turn towards performance and a
consideration of'the live' as a condition of contemporary artistic production. This paper takes its cue from the conference and session call and, in the context o f issues o f artistic 'lives' and 'live' art, asks: does art history have any life in it?
In many ways this is also to ask does it have any life left in it? I f art history's body was once animate and active in the transformation o f cultural understandings, has it now become inactive and inert as its protocols become instrumental and routinised within the institutional cultures of the academy and the museum? Has art history died? And if so, are there ways in which we might resurrect it, breathe new life into it?
The paper addresses these questions by
considering how art history, and cultural
enquiry more broadly, might address itself
to the dynamics o f the lived: from artistic
lives, to live art, to the 'life' o f the art
historical utterance itself. Drawing on my
recent book on gossip and homosexuality
in New York art, Between You and Me, as
well as upon debates about a reparative
critical writing, I will ponder how art
history might be reinvigorated by
reconsidering the 'life' o f the art historical
utterance. In this way, the paper will
foreground an attention to the
performativity o f art history's narratives
and will reflect on how the art historical
'speech act' might be taken to transform
modes o f academic attention and revivify
the politics o f cultural investigation.
Friday 7 April, 11.30-13.00
Tony Fisher
University of Essex
• On the Advantage and the
Disadvantage of (Art) History
for Art
The title of this paper takes is cue from
Nietzsche's pamphlet on historical
knowledge and its use or abuse for'life'.
At stake is the notion that humans are not
only 'historical', they are essential
historical -a theme taken up by
Heidegger. The question arises for both
thinkers as to what constitutes authentic
history? They answer: history is properly
something futund. Every 'authentic
history grasps itself in terms of its own
historicality, and as 'ensituated' in the
ACADEMIC SESSIONS 79
context of its own life-world; opposed to this is the academic view that history is a disinterested activity — something for scholars,'historians', something 'objective', factual - something concerning the 'past'. What Nietzsche questions is the validity of the latter view, with the aim of retrieving the former. History, in other words, is to be 'lived', not 'studied'. What might this have to do with art history? Or better still - what might art history have to do with art, as it is unfolded within the context of its own historical situation? This paper aims to challenge what we usually mean by
'history', by drawing on the hermeneutics of Nietzsche and Heidegger; correlatively, it asks what is meant by 'art' today - both within the discourse of art history as such, but also from the perspective of art itself: art, I shall argue, not only provides the motor for art history; more importantly, of all 'human' activities art is able to see furthest into history. As such, art reveals that the genuinely historical world remains, as yet, undecided. And yet today — there is a sense of historical 'crisis', of a freezing of historical possibility; how might art respond? Here I want to consider the work of Jack Goldstein in relation to Heidegger's concept of the Gestcll. the freezing or
'enframing' of historical possibility by technological modernity: with the correlative thought that only in grasping the essence of technology can the "frame" be broken. Arguably, only then are we released once again into being genuinely historical.
Satish Padiyar
Courtauld Institute ot Art
• Future/Futurity/Futurologies
The term that interests me in the question that the session poses is 'future'. Jacques Derrida has drawn a distinction between 'the future' and what is 'to come': the concept ot future has thus become an explicit object ot philosophy. Queer studies has formulated a notion of 'futurity', one that wrests the possibility of a certain radical agency out of the condition of allegedly implacable law-like heteronormative structures. How might art history draw upon these hopeful futurologies, to think the possibility of its
own future? If the gradual deformation of the institutional basis of British art history has produced amongst art-historian certain subject effects of mourning and depression, how might philosophy's concepts of future(s) allow us to think and practice a 'good' way of depression, and the possibility of emergence from mourning. The history of philosophy and art is itself a locus of moments and spaces of proleptic gesture, emerging from despair. 'Kant', for example, might be taken as one such. So my question is: how might art history now think the possibility of its future, while in practice drawing from the archive spaces ot futurity?
Friday 7 April, 14.00-15.30
Charlotte Frost
Birkbeck College, University of London
• New Futures in Net Art Frances
Follin: An Independent Look at
the Future
This paper focuses on the evolution of the practice and products of the art historian exemplified in approaches to the historicisation of the Web-based, niche movement of Net art. It explains that the various traditional offline systems and locations of art validation (e.g. monographs and museums) are spatially collapsed online, and that this affects a level of'disciplinary indistinction'. It further explains that from this blurred boundary a range of new methods for the interpretation, documentation and contextualisation of art arise, which redefine the relanonship between and the nature of art and art history. Net art historical approaches discussed include: the production ot pluralistic accounts of
Net art created in Net art promotional platforms; the artistry of the moderation ot and intervention into online mailing lists; and the articulation of Net art context though online performative activities. What this paper suggests, however, is that these emergent practices of contextualisation themselves require analysis - indeed contextualisation before their impact upon a wider art historical arena can be fully realised. The paper concludes that the future of art history lies in the acceptance of a move towards a more experimental, practice-based 'art history' and closes by asking what additional pressures this mightplace on funding bodies and universities to restructure their support systems in order to appreciate the potential in this burgeoning sector of transdisciplinary artists?
Frances Follin
AAH Independents Group
• An Independent Look at the Future
As chair of the AAH's Independents Group, I have a perspective of art history which is that of a practitioner outside the academic community. Drawing on my own experience and that of other Independent AAH members,! will consider the relevance of art history to the non-academic community and how this relates to the attractiveness of the subject for potential undergraduates. What sort ot careers can they expect? Do they have as much chance of being accepted for, e.g. jobs in general management as, say, English literature graduates or science graduates? I f they leave the field of art history behind them, in a professional sense, what efforts does the academic community make to nurture their
continued interest in the subject and retain them as a market for books, part-time courses, one-off lectures etc? How do we promote a view of art history as vitally engaged with social and material culture issues? We are fighting a battle and need to consider the enemy within - the visual and media studies courses that may look like a port in a storm — but are they? What arc the prospects for attracting greater numbers of mature students to study? Is 'ageism' a problem tor those who come to the subject - and want to make a career in it - later in life?
I shall address these questions, discussing current problems and suggestions for ensuring a secure future for the subject both as an academic discipline and as part ot national culture.
Does Art History Have A Future?
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
Session 22
An Over-Sexed History of Art? Art History at the Intersection of Gender and Sexuality
Convenor and Chair: Steven Stowell. Balliol College. University of Oxford,
and Kirsty A. Holmes. Queens University. Ontario
We are coming upon the 30th anniversary of the publication of Michel Foucault's first volume of Tlw History of Sexuality, a text that, among other things, synthesised a number ot emerging ideas on the topic of queer sexuality. It has been even longer since a related, though distinct, revolution overturned notions of femininity and gender: art history has never been the same. This session seeks to broadly reexamine the status of gender studies in art history across all periods with the hope of
understanding what, if anything, is next? While we may feel proud of the accomplishments and advancements that have been made toward a de-centred, non-heterocentric, non-patriarchal engagement with the histories of art, scholars, both emerging and established, approaching the topic of gender and art history may feel as though it is a minefield, theorised beyond comprehension, seething with discontent and the bruises of past (and current) political and social inequalities. Nonetheless, there stilt remain countless topics in the field of gender and art history that remain
unexamined; histories of sub-alterns
operating within the realm of visual
culture but overshadowed by the looming
presence of dominant narratives, and new
ways of reading those narratives that are
situated outside of the centre. In the wake
of these problems and possibilities, how-
are art historians continuing to work
critically in, and through, sexuality as a
discursive construct? In the spirit of this
conference, which seeks to prioritise the
art historian's agenda, this session
ultimately ask,'- when and how are
theories of gender and sexuality useful or
not useful to art historians?'
Wednesday 5 April, 11.00-12.30
Marcia Pointon
University of Manchester
• Jewel Trouble
My work on the display cultures of
jewellery explores those things that are
socially superfluous, supplemental, and
without apparent use. Intrinsic to notions
of embodiment and social distinction
across diverse cultures, jewels
simultaneously are understood to be
dangerously disruptive. For Bataille,
diamonds were equated with excrement; for Simmel they were exemplary of an inexplicable force of attraction. My paper addresses the historically shifting and provocative terrain of sexual difference in relation to jewels and their images and, in particular, it asks how we might approach the semantic contradictions thrown up by materials and artefacts that articulate the sexual unspoken of both male and female, straight and gay.
Phillippa Plock
University of Leeds
• Exchange and Gender in Art History: The Legacy of Vouet's Zingara
Art historians have long considered the role of artworks in the exchanges that constitute gender using Levi-Strauss' notion that all social relations are founded on the exchange of women between men. Simon Vouet's Zingara (1617) appears to depict such an exchange: an artisan attempts to buy a young gypsy's affection. In a moralistic twist, he is robbed by an old woman. In art historical discourse, this subversion of a homosocial economy is repeatedly 'set up' as misogynist, perpetuating a phallocentric determination of femininity.
Vouet's painting has always demanded an interpretation that attends to exchange and gender. The shifts in perspective initiated by feminist scholarship allow us to address this demand without continuing to invest in a normalised point of view. This paper seeks to restage Mieke Bal's approach of disrupting such narratives through a museological encounter between artwork and feminist methodology (Travelling Concepts, 200;), into the process ot researching and writing art history.
Through archival research. I discovered that a widow sent Vouet's Zingtira to her children when a new wife entered the family. This evidence prompted me to reread the subject as a genealogical exchange between two women over the body of a man, a representation that confounds Levi-Strauss' model. The unfamiliar social relations encountered in the historical material destabilised my accepted notions about paintings' role in a patriarchal economy. This new standpoint encouraged me to consider how the intriguing relationships between event and imagery propose new ways of conceiving artworks' function in the exchanges that helped to form gendered subjectivities.
Wednesday 5 April, 14.00-15.30
Pandora Syperek
York University
• Toronto, Puritanism, Prudery, Prurience? Circumscription of the Female Nude in Interwar Canada
Scandals that erupted over the female nude in 1930s Canada have regularly been explained away as symptoms of a backwards and 'prudish' culture. Although a certain Puritanism characterised Canadian interwar society, the question remains: why were some nudes subject to censure, yet others widely praised?
My research addresses this problem via several case studies of controversy over works by John Lyman, Bertram Brooker, Lilias Torrance Newton, Prudence Heward. and Edwin Holgate.These artists' contribution of figure painting to Canadian modernism encountered efforts to suppress the nude, often resulting in censorship. Painters and their champions retorted against the censure with accusations of prudery. Historians and curators since have worked to liberate these nudes from ignominy, inserting the formerly risque works into the national canon.
Through an examination of the charged images and the discourses that have emerged, my study asks what factors contributed to notions of propriety and how these have been subsequently rejected or upheld. Critical ot the repressive hypothesis that characterises these debates. I posit a rereading ot constructions of female sexuality implicit within the paintings and their reception. The fetishiscd and coded representation of women can indicate antimodernist reaction against the contemporary society, rather than the avant-gardism commonly inferred. Meanwhile, lengthy subsequent scandals may signify- prurience over prudery. Assuming the Foucauldian
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
notion of an oversexed revision of history, this paper employs social eontextualisation and historiography to reframe a discourse that has suffered alternately from opacity and oversimplification.
Antony Hudek
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
• Droles de Genres: Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Sherrie Levine
In this paper I argue that Sherrie Levine's work from 1977 to the present provides a radical template for the re-evaluation of the role of gender in art (history) during and after postmodernism. In particular I want to propose that Levine's articulation of gender through the literary genre of the novel recasts Mikhail Bakhtin's literary analyses and Jacques Derrida's theorisation of genre. On the one hand, Derrida posits the impossibility of defining the law of genre, even as he genders it female. On the other hand. Bakhtin defends not only the usefulness
of the category of genre but, further, the
novel as an optimal site for the
heterologies of what he terms
translinguistics. Levine's practice, then,
reconsiders both Derrida's evanescent
female genre as well as Bakhtin's
materialist conception of a trans-gender
novelistic genre.
In Sons and Lovers (1977), Meltdown (19891990) and Pathos: trots contes (2002) Levine effectively opens the category of genre — in art and literature - to the unfixity of gender. Conversely she remaps the fractured topography of gender while enforcing the laws of genre. By referencing novels which critically address the fabrication of temporal illusion and the narrators' gendered ambiguity (D. H . Lawrence, Proust, and Flaubert) Levine casts the gender/genre ambivalence as the 'an-onginal' friction that activates aesthetic production. Once categorised as a transgenre, Levine's work allows for another model of feminist practice that, at the same time, de-genders and over-sexes the operative genres in the field of art (history), namely the labels of'feminist art', and 'painting', 'sculpture', and 'photography'.
Wednesday 5 April, 16.00-17.30
Robert Summers
University of California, Los Angeles/San Diego State University
• Un-becoming Art History: Queering Art History
Can one write 'queer art history' without writing, or, righting, 'queer art history'? So, can one write, or more precisely, do, 'queer art history' in ways that complicate its current deployment? I f so, then how to do 'queer art history' in a way that moves away from what Eve Sedgwick has called 'paranoid readings' that expose, uncover, and also predict what a piece of literature in Sedgwick's case, or in this case an artwork,'means', or how its so-called 'true meaning' has been elided and erased by modernist art history toward, what Sedgwick calls, 'reparative readings' that refuse-resist readerly foreclosures and the fixing of meanings.'Reparative readings' open up to more fluid and perverse-approaches to an engagement with art. It is important to stress that between
'paranoid' and 'reparative' readings there is not an inversion of the reparative over and against the paranoid, and thus drawing 'us' to a more 'correct' or 'advanced' reading in/of 'queer art history". Furthermore, following Sedgwick's lead, there is the refusal of a hierarchy, but the accepting of non-dualistic thought; there is an oscillation of the two modes of reading: in every 'paranoid reading' there is a 'twinkling' of the 'reparative' - and vice-versa. So. a queering. What I call a 'queering art history' is without a 'proper' methodology or a 'proper' object. A 'queering art history' that is improper, unbecoming, and un-disciplined. And, none of this would have been, or be, possible without the inroads made by feminism - feminism is always in/ot the 'queer' of'queer art history'.
Carol Jacobi
Birkbeck College. University of London
• Millais, Sex and the
Synthetic Subject
Amidst the exhilarating revisions effected since the 1970s, there lies the inconvenient fact that some gender-based art history has reinforced stereotypes and
constructed its own repressive practices. The problem frequently lies in the use of binary definitions of male/female, homo/hetero -a grid through which images are viewed. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of'the Victorian' where works of art are disconnected from the particularity of the artist's vision and used to extrapolate 'norms', variations of which are spoken of not as developments or experiments, but as 'problematic'. Millais is a key instance of a curtailment of viewing by expectation that has resulted in works being presented as sexually 'problematic', representations of dominant or alternative models of masculinity which are compromised by contrary characteristics. This narrative implies a subtle self-deception that
discredits the painter and could not be further from the truth. Millais' early paintings can, I believe, be understood as an extremely nuaneed interrogation of the Romantic notion of the subject (in particular, the artist) in the context of the materialism of modern, urban life. Male and female characters are interchanged with extraordinary freedom to explore existential models which are dialectical not binary, continuous not discrete. Themes of sacred and secular love can be seen as an aspect of a deeper debate about individual and society, sight and insight, dislocation and inclusion.This paper uses as its starting point Millais' self-portrait as a nun St Agnes Eve, and goes on to offer new readings of his major works. In so doing it hopes to deepen our understanding of the elasticity of Victorian genders.
ACADEMIC SESSIONS An Over-Sexed History of Art? Art History at the Intersection of Gender and Sexuality
Session 23 Parkinson Building: Room B 10
History of Art beyond its National Boundaries
Convenor and Chair: Jutta Vinzent, The Barber Institute of fine Arts, The University of Birmingham
This session addresses History of Art as a discipline, questioning whether its practices (research culture, methods and approaches) have been nationalised in past and present through three case studies:
•
Czech art history in the nineteenth century and the influence of German and Austrian scholarship
•
Irish art history and the influence of German versus English art scholarship
•
The development of art historical education in East Asia and the influence of the Anglo-American scholarship
A plenary discussion with the speakers after the papers will consider issues of academic dominance and whether we can still talk about History of Art in terms of national identities (is there a 'German', 'Austrian', 'British', 'Irish', 'Anglo-American', etc. History of Art?) in a globalised world in which academic 'tourism' has become the norm and exchanges between countries is much more permeable, while on the other hand, there are national boards such as the British RAE and QA A panels and the HEFCE and AHRG funding bodies, monitoring research and teaching in Britain.
These issues are not only pressing because of the forthcoming RAE, but also in light of Europe (Britain has signed the Sorbonne Declaration that began the process of creating the European Higher Education Area; all participating countries should have an overarching European qualification framework, quality assurance mechanisms that regulate without impeding national and institutional autonomy and the adoption ot the Diploma Supplement to make mobility across national borders a reality in 2010) and the Internet, which brings scholars closer together through networking software.
Wednesday 5 April, 11.00-12.30
Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes
University of Ulster
• Irish Art History and the
Co-Existence of Different
Art-Historical Traditions
While national categories in art are problematic (Belting), there are boundaries, distinct intellectual traditions between art-historical practices in different European countries - and they have bearings on the
(dis)contents in and with the field.
In this paper, I will focus on the Irish situation (in advance ofAAH 2007, Belfast). Irish art history is a mix of a proximity to/amalgamation into the U K (North), continuing 'old art history' in Southern Universities, and some US-led initiatives invigorating the field now.
Firstly, I argue that 'German' art history-
suits the country's history and art practice
better than the U K variety, because
continuing (mental) colonisation is
inevitable i f the intellectual standards of the
(former) coloniser are allowed to prevail.
Secondly, the decade-long predominance
of Greenbergian formalism in English-
speaking art history is not paralleled in
Germany — or in Irish art. Instead, Irish art
has for long borne meaning, i.e. operated
within what can best be described in a
Hegelian tradition as an attention to
materiality ami mentality. European
perspectives are called for, like Didi
Huberman's (CV que nous voyons ...).
He proposes ways of approaching the
simultaneous occurrence of form and
content, matter and meaning.
The current Irish-themed issue of 77iirrf Text diagnoses a still prevailing colonial mindset, as well as under-theorisation. It does so from a continental European perspective. These roots of our discipline can make a substantia] contribution and address the co-existence of form and content. However, can one also make a case for an 'Irish' solution, whereby all coexistent (national) traditions are valuable?
Maria Filipova
Edinburgh College of Art
• The Construction of National
Identity in Czech Art History
If we accept that traditionally. Art History-was divided into national art histories, we should look at the origins of such segmentation. Using the example of Czech art history; I shall examine the starting point for construction of this particular national history ot art.
Like other small countries, in the second half of the I9 t' 1 Century Bohemia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, experienced a rise of national self-consciousness. The Czechs defined
themselves in opposition to their German
and Austrian 'Other,' where the German-
speaking people epitomised the political
and cultural oppressors.
The beginnings of the institutionalised
n
Czech art history in the late I9 t century are likewise based on the complex relationship between the Czech and German scholars writing on art. Given the historical circumstances and the long-lasting presence of German education and culture in central Europe, 'Czech' art history was to a large extent established by scholars educated in German and/or by the German-speaking professors mostly in Vienna.
Accordingly, 1 shall ask the following
questions: to what extent was the Czech
history of art provoked by German
scholarship? Is the creation of Czech
national art history indebted to German-
speaking 'fathers'? To what extent is art
history in the Czech Republic still shaped
by German and Austrian scholarship?
Wednesday 5 April, 14.00-15.30
Kyung-hee Choi
Wagner College, New York
• Art History as a Discipline
in East Asia
Countries in East Asia have established art
history as a discipline in institutions of
advanced study and in colleges from the
early twentieth century. Japan has a
longest history of art historians trained
abroad and established the subject as a
discipline during the country's
modernisation. After the Second World
War. Taiwan and South Korea have seen a
growing number of art historians who
obtained advanced degrees in Europe and
in the U.S. Focusing on a few cases and
following several prominent scholars
careers, I will analyse the value and
influence of art historical education
abroad on these countries in East Asia.
Discussing how art history has claimed its
place in higher learning and government
system in East Asia and comparing the
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
situation with those in other European and Anglo-American countries.
I want to ponder whether the field will survive as an independent discipline and how it will become more attractive to the coming generations of students. According to the Economist's recent survey, the Chinese are going to be the largest consumer group o f higher learning, both in their homeland and abroad. Will they pursue an advanced degree in art history as much as they do in engineering and natural and social science? How much would they value a foreign degree? M y paper will bring an insightful perspective of art
history's past and present in East Asia,
which has long been a savvy consumer
ot advanced study under the auspice of
Anglo-American scholarship.
Discussion Panel on National
traditions -Current Practices
including all participants and
invited guests
ACADEMIC SESSIONS History of Art beyond its National Boundi
Session 24 kinson Building: Room B 21
Disciplinary Ethics - A Roundtable Discussion
Convenor and Chair: Richard J. Williams. University of Edinburgh
This roundtable discussion explores the relationship between art history and the wider world and what moral or ethical positions inform (or do not inform) what art historians do. Why should academics want to intervene in an area so much bound up with the taste of ruling elites and high finance? What do they want from it? What good do they imagine they will do with it? These questions refer back to the questions posed by the so-
called new art history in the early 1970s, the last time the discipline tried to define itself in a comprehensive way. In much changed and expanded circumstances they are worth asking anew.
The session makes two assumptions about the current state of art history. It assumes the discipline is stronger than ever. Certain subject areas may be in decline, certain institurions may have given it up, and certain academics may fret about its place in the disciplinary hierarchy. But any economic measure of art historical activity would uncover more teaching, research, exhibitions, areas of employment, mass-media involvement, and more publications than ever before. And it assumes that academic art historians increasingly expect to be
involved in this wide range of activities. Encouraged by their employers, they must develop relationships with museums, with the art market, the mass media, and with contemporary artists. Some have always done this: the difference is the intensification of this kind of activity to the point where it has become norm rather than exception.
I f there is a crisis, it is an ethical one. This session explores the ethics of art history. Can we make ethical choices when we speak of art history1 What would an ethical art history look like now? How do academic art historians stand in relation to the art museum, the motor of urban regeneration or the tourist industry? How do ethical considerations inform what they teach and research? What do academic art historians stand forr The panel will provide short, possibly confessional, position papers followed by
a debate open to the floor.
Wednesday 5 April, 14.00-15.30 and Wednesday 5 April, 16.00-17.30
Participants: Gavin Butt, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Helen Rees. University of Manchester; Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art; Evelyn Welch, Queen Mary, University of London; and Richard Williams, University of Edinburgh
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
86 ACADEMIC SESSIONS
Session 25 Old Mining Building: Room G 19 The Artist Interview: Contents and Contentions in Oral History/Art History
Convenors and Chairs: Jon Wood, Henry Moore Institute. Rob Perks. National Sound Archive, and Bill Furlong, Audio Arts
Since the introduction of the Phillips audio cassette in the early 1960s, the widespread availability of recording equipment has meant that anyone with an interest in art can not only listen to recordings (and read transcripts) but also can easily conduct interviews themselves. Artists too have been more easily able to speak for themselves - in conversation and on record - and bypass critical and historical assessment by a third party. Such developments have facilitated the rise of oral testimony from the margins into the academic mainstream and seen the artist
interview becoming an important source of information for researchers today. The artist interview can be accessed as text and as recording. And as well as a growing literature in transcribed and published form such as Patricia Norvell's Recording Conceptual Art (2001) and Judith Olch Richards' Inside the Studio (2004), there are also an increasing number of archives of original recordings, accumulated through the important work done in the last few-decades by organisations such as 'Audio Arts' (est. 1973) and the 'Artists' Lives' project (est. 1990) at the National Sound Archive.
This session is co-convened by representatives from these two projects, but its concerns extend more widely. It examines the status and function of the artist interview today and consists of 12 contributions that all demonstrate some of the complexities and potentialities of this genre of art writing and art recording. They range from historical papers and first hand accounts of the problems of interviewing, editing and transcribing, and of transferring the spoken word onto the page, to presentations by artists interested in the artist interview and papers from museum personnel on its crucial role within conservation.
Wednesday 5 April, 11.00-12.30
Judith Bumpus
Independent Scholar
• From Objective Record to Personal Scrutiny: A Precursory History of the Artist Interview at the BBC
In the history of broadcasting the artist interview was a relative latecomer to visual
arts programming. This paper examines the gradual, and to an outsider haphazard, process whereby in the earliest wireless days of the 1920s educational and instructive talks by an 'interpreter', or voice of authority on matters unfamiliar to the general public, was allowed to dominate visual arts broadcasting to the exclusion of the artist?s own voice, introducing spontaneous conversation at a much later stage. It considers technical and editorial reasons for these developments, and why the prepared 'debate' was preferred to spontaneity.
In explanation, this paper investigates what the BBC's programme policy, editorial criteria, and production values were in respect of the artist?s contribution; from talks in which the artist was represented by an intermediary; to the use in the 1940s of artists such as Michael Ayrton, William Towsend or Patrick Heron, as critics and general pundits; to scripted talks in which the artist spoke for his or her own work. In the 1950s, and then in the early 1960s with the availability of the portable tape-recorder, it became possible for John Read, a T V producer, to make films on location, in which the artist spoke naturally to camera or in an edited voice-over. The radio conversation developed alongside, notably on the Third Programme and famously with David Sylvester as interviewer and Leonie Cohn as producer. The subsequent trend was for extempore-radio and television interviewing and a subsequent shift from objective record to personal scrutiny.
Nell McClister
BOMB magazine, New York
• Opening Voices:
The BOMB Interview
In its quarter-century of publishing in-depth interviews between visual artists and their peers in both an and literature. BOM B Magazine has reinvented the interview as an intimate, intellectual and revealing conversation, a dialogue rather than the monologic informing that characterises the journalistic Q &; A or the critical essay. BOM B was launched because its founding editors, all artists, saw a disparity between the way in which they and their peers talked about their work and the terms in which critics discussed it.
The dialogic form allows for an open exchange not only between the participants but also between spoken word and text, between speaker and editor, between document and reader, and between the moments ot all these. The BOM B interview, definitive yet necessarily fragmentary, is a living, breathing primary document: discourse in motion. As such, it is ideally suited to the process of reflecting on art — itself a give-and-take of the most profound sort, focusing as it does on the most elusive of forms, the cultural artefact, which encompasses at once the deepest
authenticity and the most metamorphic shape-shifting.
BOMB's senior editor, Nell McClister, will discuss the magazine's origins in the art and performance scene in downtown New York, the changing topography of art writing with regard to the artist's firsthand testimony since BOMB's inception in
1981, and the magazine's distinctive method of bringing the spoken word to the page, which preserves the immediacy of the original conversation while allowing for the elaboration ot complex thoughts through collaborative editing.
Wednesday 5 April, 14.00-15.30 Cathy Courtney
National Life Stories, British Library
• Artists' Lives
I will speak about the evolution — philosophical and economic - of National Life Story Collection'sArtists' Lives oral history project, which started in 1990 and currently contains 224 recordings. Artists' Lives provides a model through which to explore many of the questions raised by the AA H conference strand, and I would like to address not only issues such as the structure and methodology of the recordings and the relanonship between interviewer and interviewee, but also the important question of the way in which the recordings reflect on one another and themselves generate new areas for documentation. Artists' Lives is unusual in situating its recordings within the wider social history context ot NLSC's broad-ranging projects, in making life-story recordings and because its recordings are made by interviewers who are not, on the whole, primary users of the
material themselves.
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Bj
I will play extracts to demonstrate how the recordings interweave and challenge, verify and contradict each other, bringing into existence a volatile and shifting body of evidence for the assessment of contemporary art historians and the re-asscssment of researchers in the long-term future.
Noor Nieftagodien
University of Witwatersrand, South African
• Artists in Conversation
The paper will critically reflect on the oral history project,'Artists in Conversation', which involved life history interviews with fourteen local artists drawn from a variety of communities. The interviews were used to write narratives and interpretive pieces of the artists and the art community in South Africa. Oral history has become widely used as a tool to excavate the country's hidden pasts. This project of excavation and historical re-writing has focused primarily on the political, particularly on the role played by liberation movements in the anti-apartheid struggle. While this is both necessary and understandable, it has tended to marginalize the process of uncovering histories that are not overtly political.
Recently, however, there has been a growing recognition of the importance to cast the net of historical enquiry wider, to include the arts and culture, while simultaneously adhering to the approach of writing 'history from below'. The 'Artists in Conversation', project occurred at a critical moment, which may signal the opening of a window of opportunity for oral history in the arts to flourish.
The paper will analyse the employment of a particular mode of oral methodology, namely, life histories. It will critically engage with the artists' varied responses to the project (which ranged from critical endorsement to scepticism) and how these articulated with the objectives set by the research team.The multiple conversations between the various participants, and between the project and the public profoundly affected both the process and product, all of which holds interesting lessons for future oral histories of arrists.
Wednesday 5 April, 16.00-17.30
Brian Winkenweder
Linfield College, McMinnville
• Finding Homometric Equilibrium: Robert Morris and the E-lnterview
Email signals a historic shift in the manner in which artists, critics and scholars communicate with one another; therefore, we must examine the advantages and disadvantages of the e-interview. This paper asserts that e-intcrviews are a hybrid mode of communication, flexibly located between conversations and letters. Inasmuch, they should not be seen as equal to conventional interviews. For the past decade, Robert Morris, a Conceptual Artist most well known for his Minimalist sculptures, has rejected real-time, one-onone interviews. Through analysis of this artist's embrace of the e-interview, I will show how email has the capacity to dialectically synthesise the directness of speech with the circumspection ot writing.
Perhaps the e-interview provides Robert Morris security in what Roland Barthes called the 'trap of scription' whereby the casual innocence ot speech is exposed and, through writing, we censure ourselves, editing out blunders and misleading statements. Like Morris, Barthes was uncomfortable with the constraints of the recorded interview; he claimed 'speech is dangerous because it is immediate and can not be taken back' (The Grain of the \bice, 4). What Barthes sought was a 'homometrics' whereby there is 'a correct metric relation between what one has to say and the way one says it.' I contend that the e-interview, for Robert Morris, provides him 'homometric' equilibrium, whereby he can discuss his work and ideas in a forum that benefits from both the immediacy of speech and the reflexivity ot writing.
Dr Christian Weikop
University of Sussex
• Monologue, Dialogue and
the Power Relations of the
Artist Interview
I will be using Bakhtinian notions of
monologue/dialogue as a means of
opening up certain critical spaces with
respect to the power relations and dynamics of the artist interview. By looking at particular examples pertinent ti the issue of authorship (including moments from a recent interview conducted by the speaker with the artist Dorian Ker), a key question emerges.Witf respect to the agency of meaning, where does the authority lie - with the artist, critic or viewer/reader?
Thursday 6 April, 11.00-12.30
Avis Berman
Independent Scholar, New York
• The Conversation That Isn't: The Role of the Interviewer in the Oral History Process
Ideally, an oral history is a tape-recorded memoir in which the subject - the interviewee — converses with a well-informed interviewer. Although it is an occasion in which two people talk to each other, the oral history can never genuinely be characterised as a conversation because of the purposeful role and tense position of the interviewer. The aims of the oral historian are to inspire confidence, obtain trust, coax candor, and get the story. However, unlike the journalist, in order to extract sensitive information, the interviewer working for a scholarly institution can often promise temporary but inviolate restrictions on access and publication in exchange for permanent future frankness.
The interviewer with a certain gmvitos or obvious seasoning has a huge advantage. Artists' egos being what they are, many will not appreciate a green interviewer sent to experiment on them. The interviewer must establish bom fides immediately or time may be wasted in a tussle to win the artist's regard. As a part of this intellectual ingratiation. the interviewer must also be prepared to give in order to get. Lasting personal and professional bonds can form i f the interviewer wishes to maintain them. If the subject is pleased about how he or she was recorded, the interviewer glides into a role of a continuing confidante or expert to be called on for further collaborations.
These points will be illustrated by-examples of situations that occurred when
ACADEMIC SESSIONS The Artist Interview: Contents and Contentions in Oral History/Art History
I interviewed such figures as Katharine Kuh, Allan Kaprow, and many others.
Phyllis Tuchman
Independent Scholar, New York
• On Doing Artist Interviews
Artist's statements appear in various formats and lengths. They range from the short and pithy, say, sentences printed as entries in the catalogues of group shows, to books by literate painters and sculptors such as Frank Stella and David Hockney. From time to time, questionnaires are circulated and published in art magazines and literary journals. Institutions such as the Archives of American Art sponsor Oral
History programs. The Getty and a number of universities collect artists' papers. Under different editors, art magazines have printed all sorts of features. For example, An Sews during the 1950s ran many 'X ' painted a picture articles; and Artfomm during the early 1970s had Q& A style interviews. Even Ardiitectural Digest did a series of visits to artists' studios. Recently, celebrity profiles have been popular.
In its finest incarnation, the artist interview has the critical insights of a well-argued essay and the immediacy of a letter to a relative or close friend. At its worst, it's a bad imitation of a late night talk show. When they're good, we tend to credit the intellect, imagination, charm, and wit of the artists rather than their interlocutors. But some credit should be directed to those who ask the questions. They're not just turning on a tape recorder. A great artist interview involves research and editing skills. Critics, curators, and journalists must keep their egos in check. After all, it's the subjects who are supposed to shine. Facts are the province of chronologies. The artist interview is after bigger game:'deep background'.
Thursday 6 April, 14.00-15.30
Robert Proctor
Glasgow School of Art
• The Architect's Intention
This paper will propose an argument centred on the problems of oral history in relation to artistic intention. Interviews with the architects of Gillespie, Kidd &
Coia, whose most significant work was produced between thirty and fifty years ago, show that oral history is no more reliable than any other mode of investigation in recovering the intentions of the creator of a work of art. During the intervening time, the architects have rehearsed divergent narratives of their work, which an interview can only partially unpick, while any such unpicking is at the risk of confrontation. Not only that, but the architects have responded to other narrations of their work which have coloured and redirected their own stories. And while few of their buildings have
remained static, many undergoing radical changes or demolition, architectural concerns have also shifted, their movements followed closely by the architects in question. Besides such crucial uncertainties over the architects' own representations of their work, the production and transcription of oral interviews introduces the problems surrounding the creation and reading of texts which further undermine our confidence in their validity. Since an interview cannot be trusted, therefore, to elucidate conception, it must be read as a text ot reception - the self-reception of the artist. The paper thus explores the critical question of the gap between original conception and it's retelling,
testing it through a peculiar case study
involving oral history, and finally
maintaining the elusive nature
of intention.
Jennifer Goodell
Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles
• Beyond the Cocktail Reception: Expanding Art Historical Projects with Gallerist Interviews
The obvious subject of most art historical oral history projects has been the artist. A less examined subject is the gallerist, whose influence on the production of visual art often passes unmeasured. The relationships between gallerist, artist, collector, and critic are topics that can enrich the study of individual artists. This fertile area of inquiry requires an approach that goes beyond the anecdotal or cursory to ask such salient questions as: How are artists' personas developed through such means as advertising? How does gender and class function in this milieu? This paper will examine some completed oral histories with artists and gallerists active in the second half of the 20th century, paying particular attention to patterns and tendencies in the questions. Are we being considered and historiographically diligent enough in developing lines of questioning for gallerists?
My personal experience of conducting an oral history with Patricia Faure will also be discussed. Patricia Faure has been a gallerist since 1972, first working with Nicolas Wilder and later partner with Betty Asher. Her association with the arts, however, began much earlier with friendships with artists in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. Some of Faure's photographs of artists taken in the 1950s and 1960s have themselves become the quintessence of such playful, period-evocative documentation. Such photographs and other ephemera are evidence of the nuanced artist-gallerist relationship and parsing out these relationships must
involve thoughtful interviews informed by an understanding of both the artist's work and that of his or her representative.
Thursday 6 April, 16.00-17.30
Ysbrand Hummelen
and Tatja Scholte
Netherlands Institute for
Cultural Heritage, Amsterdam
• Artist Interviews and Artists'
Archives as a Tool for the
Conservation Strategy for
Contemporary Art
The reile of the curator and conservator in museums of contemporary art as documentalist is increasingly important. They concern themselves with the documentation and archiving ot work processes and artistic practices within a huge range of techniques and amongst layers of significance. This documentation is often the only source on which the future presentation of a work can be based. For conceptual and ephemeral works it may even be an alternative to the conservation of physical objects. There is a clear need for knowledge concerning the context of the genesis of the works.
However, the exact nature of that knowledge and how it could be obtained
Old Mining Building: Room G19 ACADEMIC SESSIONS 89
has only recently become the subject of research. In the projects Artists' Interviews/Artists' Archives, these subjects have been and continue to be studied by the Dutch Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (SBMK) and the Conservation Research Department of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN).An interdisciplinary, qualitative and case-based research approach was developed: 1 2 participating museums for contemporary art proposed an artist to be interviewed. For each artist, an interdisciplinary group of experts determined the type of information needed for the future preservation of the works. After in-depth research the artists were interviewed and
the interviews were recorded on video.
Bill Furlong
Audio Arts, London
• Hearing between the Lines
Contrary to popular opinion, the interview is not a one-way process, a passive nor a non-critical strategy for gaining insights into artists practice, thinking and the debates that surround it. The interview and conversation are an integral process of knowing and learning, not in a linear narrative sense, but rather parallel to the process of thought itself in time and space, and in the thinking about and the making of art.
Human exchange is complex and multi-layered. Not only do we hear words with prescribed meanings, but we also read between the lines. We interpret the actively of human communication and assist in the construction of meanings often 'reading between the lines'.
Spoken language is a sequence of constructions aimed at conveying personalised versions of truth and reality. With the spoken word it is often hard to pin down actual meaning because in the next sentence an idea, proposition or assertion might be contradicted or modified. There are many dimensions of speech that do not translate onto the printed page. We 'read between the lines', interpret and participate in the construction of meaning. There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about the term 'interview' and its possibilities. It is more than just arriving with a tape recorder, switching it on and recording. This presents an oral history as a passive way of gleaning peoples reminiscences after the event - and is therefore unreliable and inaccurate to be termed history.
ACADEMIC SESSIONS The Artist Interview: Contents and Contentions in Oral History/Art History
Session 26
Critical Distance: Epiphany and the Sense of Place
Convenor and Chair: Richard Wrigley. University of Nottingham
It is a commonplace that artists and architects have believed that change of place can have transformative effects on their creative trajectories, be it the rite of passage of encountering Rome, and other cultural metropolises, or an escape to primitivising oases. But what of art historians? What does the history of art history owe to art historians' experience of geographical displacement, relocation, and the reconfiguration of centre and periphery? What are the connections between such mobility and different ways of thinking? How does the tension between loyalty to intellectual terra cognita
and the lure of foreign, or cosmopolitan,
novelty play out both in terms of self-
conscious reflection on individual
development, and perceptions of
institutionalised conceptual habits? What
effects are produced by dislocation, be it
exile (voluntary or enforced), or the
banalities of the lecture tour and
international conference circuit?
The relevance of this phenomenon to the current academic landscape is unmistakable: thanks to abundant research leave funding, art historians have never been so mobile. What effect is this having on the intellectual, but also structural, nature of the discipline?
Thursday 6 April, 11.00-12.30
Meaghan Clarke
University of Sussex
• Locating a Critical Place:
Art History's Geography
in the Nineteenth Century
In Thoughts About Art (1873) the editor, critic and print historian P.G. Hamerton declared that 'people who stay at home-could not "become art critics".'Travel was an intrinsic part of the development of art writing and art history during the nineteenth century. Travel both enabled and determined new developments in exhibitions, artistic production and art writing. I will examine here the critical trajectories formulated by art writers during this period as they travelled between metropolitan centres, from London to Paris, The Hague, Munich, Rome and on to the periphery. The modern art world had shifted to encompass these increasingly
cosmopolitan urban centres, thereby facilitating a more mobile artistic exchange.
Periodicals were read widely outside London and individual critics travelled over vast distances recording exhibitions, and exploring new places and collections. For women this mobility enabled a new independence that made the lure of foreign relocation all the more enticing; this, combined with the visual possibilities, resonated within their writing about art. This paper will consider the spaces inhabited by women art writers in conjunction with their contributions to the ever-expanding art historical literature.
I will explore the tensions around their
own sense of place and their writings
about art and artists beyond Britain.
Lewis Johnson
stanbu
• Ideals of Critical Distance and
the Sacrifice of Senses of Place
in Modernising Culture: The
Case of Osman Hamdi and the
Alexander Sarcophagus
Son of the Ottoman prime minister, painter, pupil of Gerome, architectural consultant and historian of dress in the Ottoman Empire, Osman Hamdi was also the first director of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Having drafted the passing ot a law forbidding the export ot antiquities from the empire in 1884, Osman Hamdi became something of an active enforcer ot this law. seeking to protect classical and other remains as the inheritance ot an Ottoman culture anxious to stave off signs of decline. In
1887, Osman Hamdi received news of the discovery of a series of sarcophagi at Sayda in the Lebanon and went to supervise excavation and transportation.
Perhaps because of the terms of the law. however, it seems it was difficult to commission a ship to transport the finds back to Istanbul. Strapping himself to what is now known as the Alexander sarcophagus (not that ot Alexander the Great, as was once imagined, but, in all likelihood, that ot King Abdalonymos of Sidon, one of Alexander's hunting partners). Osman Hamdi attached himself to the now renowned piece and it was
•kinson Building: Room B 21
£15 I/)
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3
lifted on to a ship, to be housed in a new,
classically-inspired building that opened in
Istanbul in 1891.
How may we read this narrative of
dedication? Was Osman Hamdi acting in
conformity with a desire common in
modern culture to seek to conserve the
artistic masterpieces of the past? How is
this act marked by the dynamics of intraand inter-imperial relations? Does the
later involvement of Ernest Renan,
positivist theorist of the national, trying to
decipher the significance of the find,
indicate a peculiarity or a limit in this
promotion of the Ottoman Empire as
modern cultural domain?
This paper will seek to suggest that this
drama ot life-risking dedication of
attachment to the work of art acts out, as
it were hyperbolically, the ideal of critical
distance apparently to be sacrificed in the
transport of the work of art to the
imperial, if not metropolitan centre. The
risk of death from the sculpted tomb will
be considered in relation to the
transposition of Western ideals ot cultural
property, as well as in relation to Islamic
ideals of martyrdom, and in relation to a
certain acting out of what the sarcophagus
sculpted surfaces show, of scenes ot
hunting and death.
Thursday 6 April, 14.00-15.30
Sunil Manghani
York St John
• Visiting Theory, Barthes,
Japanisme, and an (Un)certain
Visual Literacy
...in no way claiming to represent or to analyse reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) -11 can / isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) .1 certain number of features ... and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs
...if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokyo. On the contrary, you will ... sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effea there, you mil not see it anywhere.
Oscar Wilde
ACADEMIC SESSIONS 9
In this paper I draw critical purpose from
the recurring trope (from a 'Western'
perspective) of'being lost' in Japan. 1
write intentionally as a visitor to the
Japanese culture, in order to show how 1 think it makes for a visual curiosity that is pertinent to 'releasing' a certain visual literacy. I focus upon a selection of cultural incidents - both verbal and visual
- but the key 'text' is Roland Barthes' (1982) Empire of Signs (his oft ignored study of Japan). Here, Barthes invites us into 'situations of writing', or spaces (even pauses) in which another voice might be heard. Situations in which otherwise all meaning would be lost in translation. Thus, here, we are photographed, not the other way round and in the process we encounter another writing entirely. A visual writing perhaps, or at least a writing with images (and not about them). As my 'argument' proceeds, it is fair to say I am not entirely convinced there is any definable ' thing' we might call 'visual literacy' as can be discussed, or written about. Instead - whilst no less critical than the word - it is something you need best orient yourself in, or visit.
Elizabeth Norman
Retired, Sheffield Hallam University
• A Different Place: Japan
and Public Art
Japan presents a different place from which to study the progress of public art. It presents a peripheral position. Whereas the Western contemporary practice is known all over the world, almost nothing is known about Japanese public art outside Japan. It is apparently not perceived to be as fashionable or as exotic as some other contemporary Japanese art forms. Public art was announced a 'new' art in Japan in 1995, much later than in the West. It appeared without an identified provenance or critical understanding; it was simply adopted. Fuelled by the bubble economy, the Tokyo-based first projects were attached to well-endowed property developments. These became the models for a declared new but somewhat dated and conventional practice, largely out-door exhibitions of art. Japan did not
immediately grasp the meaning of a
public-orientated practice; public is an
unfamiliar word and the concept of publicness is not found in the country's social or work systems. Thus, to study public art in Japan as an outsider is to work with few of the expected resources given. A specific history and critical discourse is emerging but is yet to be established. Even so, a number of current projects have taken a more radical form and others have begun to explore how public art may be practiced and understood in Japan, looking to traditions and customs of local communities as indigenous forms of public art. Japan offers a place for the student of public art
to observe a familiar practice made-strange and thus critically exposed.
Thursday 6 April, 16.00-17.30
Mark Rawlinson
University of Nottingham
• Adorno, 90210
Adorno wrote in Minima Moratta, 'For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live' and to this end, this paper will address the impact of Adorno's time in Los Angeles as an exile. Although in exile, Adorno was not alone. In fact he was surrounded by other members of the Frankfurt School, as well as Bertolt Brecht (who thought of Los Angeles as Hell), Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. However, the experience of Los Angeles seems to have intensified Adorno's sense of dislocation from 'home', forcing him to retreat into writing in an effort to preserve something of his European identity. In some senses exile from suggests a return to, where exile is a form of waiting; but what does one do whilst waiting? To contextualise Adorno's Los Angeles epiphany, this paper will discuss how a series of key experiences in America contributed to
the shaping of Adorno's thought on dwelling, art and philosophy and suggest the continued relevance of many of his ideas tor art history.
Discussion Panel including
the speakers
ACADEMIC SESSIONS Critical Distance: Epiphany and the Sense of Place
Session 27 Old Mining Building: Room 2.01
Student Session: Who Do We Think We Are?
Convenors and Chairs: Beth Williamson. University of Essex, and Claire Walsh, Birkbeck College. University of London
The theme of this conference is the practice of art history itself: what we're doing, why — and whether we should be doing it differently. As such, it has particular resonance for those of us who are at the start of our professional careers. The focus of this session is to explore who we are as art historians, what we are researching and why, as well as considering the particular methodologies we employ. The research of art history postgraduates is often at the forefront of progressive thinking within the discipline, opening up new realms and uncharted
territories.This session explores recent developments and new scholarship in the history of art as they affect us all, with new perspectives and approaches revealed in papers that touch on important social, cultural and political issues; the limits of visual perception; internet art; the relationship between artists and scientists; and intersections between literary and visual works. Some of the most exciting research in art history today is occurring on the very boundaries of the discipline and this is reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of the papers that make up this session.
Friday 7 April, 09.30-11.00
Stefan Aloszko
University of Plymouth
• An Enquiry into the Possibility of Establishing a Cohesive Approach Towards the Ethical and Moral Dilemma faced by Museology at Auschwitz-Birkenau
This paper will situate the ethical and
moral problems that are encountered
when embarking upon a museological
study of the State Museum at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Given that sixty years have passed since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau, our relationship to the Event is at a delicate point. It is now important that we define what should be the correct tone of response, and measure of expression to the event. The second generation survivor Eva Hoffman has pointed out: 'stand too close to horror, and you get fixation, paralysis, engulfinent; stand too far, and you get voyeurism or forgetting'.1 How should the museology of Auschwitz best solve this problem? What are the moral and ethical rules that should govern the enquiry and transmission of this subject?
Museologists acknowledge that the last decade has seen an increase in Holocaust studies in both Europe and North America, and several Holocaust museums have opened to controversial reception. It appears that Holocaust studies are presently at the centre of museological debates, but how does Auschwitz appear in this telling and retelling?
M y intention is therefore to consider the development of muscology's response to the subject ot the Holocaust, and to consider the nature ot place, space, and memory at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and how these concepts, when conjoined with the subject matter of the site inevitably invoke ethical and moral dilemmas which may well force museology to broaden its remit to include a multidisciplinary approach that will expand the established boundaries of the discipline.
1 Eva Hoffman, After Sucli Knowledge,
Seeker and Warburg. London, UK. 2004,
P-I77
Adair Rounthwaite
University of Amsterdam
• Veiled Subjects: Constructions of Islam and Agency In and Around the Art of Shirin Neshat
The notion ot women's own complicity
with patriarchal Islam has become an
increasingly heated topic for both
feminist scholars and the mainstream
Western media, particularly post-
September 11. Among feminisms, a major
division lies between liberal critics who
to some degree uphold 'universal' liberal
norms and rights regardless of cultural
context, and critics such as Saba
Mahmood working with Butler and
Foucault-based models of subjectivation
who question whether an individualising,
emancipatory model is one with which
we should view the subjectivities of
Muslim women. Simultaneously, cultural
objects created by Muslim women which
express individual interpretations of Islam,
such as the films and photographs of
Iranian-born American artist Shirin
Neshat, are recently being valued by
critics, art institutions, and publishers as avenues through which to introduce Western audiences to a more 'modern' version of Islam. This paper will provide a brief discourse analysis of the way that Neshat's work has been viewed by art critics, discussing how they attribute agency to her, and how this supports the discursive construction of a highly individualised, emancipation-oriented Islamic female subjectivity, which is mapped both onto the bodies of Neshat's subjects, and molded into a problematic monolithic conception of the 'third world woman'. My aim is to evaluate the
usefulness ot Mahmood's theory of agency for a textual reading of Neshat's art, not in order to reaffirm an originary, centralised authorship, but as a way of examining how some subjects are privileged in art critical and historical discourse at the expense of others. In conclusion. I will employ such an analysis to demonstrate the tension that exists between the works as illuminating the 'ethical' voice of Islam in contrast to its repressive institutionalised forms, and the foreclosure of other possible perspectives through an imposition ot what critics construct as 'the artist's own' interpretation of Islam onto the implied subjects of other Muslim women.
Friday 7 April, 11.30-13.00
Caroline Jordan
University of Leeds
• Shaping Sculptor's Lives:
Shaping Sculpture's Histories
In 1953 Rupert Gunnis published his Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851, a pioneering contribution to the study of sculpture which has been long accepted as the standard reference book for the subject. The Dictionary is currently the focus of a major revision project and a new edition will be issued in 2007. This paper, written from the perspective of a postgraduate student who has contributed to the Dictionary, will use the Gunnis revision as a starting point for examining how conventions of writing about sculptors have shaped the ways in which sculpture itself has been written about and understood.
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
For information on many nineteenth-century sculptors (iunnis relied upon their obituaries published in the art press as the basis of his entries. Many sculptors' obituaries employ the same narrative devices and are punctuated by similar sets
of anecdotes. These highly idealised
literary constructions were transposed to
the Dictionary and are now enshrined. The
primary focus of my paper will be to
demonstrate how obituaries as texts have
affected the rhetorical construction of a
sculptor's life and practice. It is crucial to
interrogate these primary texts and their
conventions to appreciate how they have
misshapen and contorted our
understanding of sculptural practice in the
nineteenth century. This paper will also
investigate the methodological problems
faced by a scholar negotiating biography,
consider why the history of sculpture is
so often the history of sculptors, and
analyse the challenges faced by students
who are approaching this subject today.
Ignaz Cassar
University of Leeds
• At the Limits of the Visual
This paper is concerned with concepts of disclaiming the visual in the visual arts and the implications for the discipline of art history and its theoretical approaches to their objects of study. How do these works challenge the spectator and his/her expectations of what the visual in art might be? Where is the visual to be found and how might it be evacuated from the actual piece of art? And what kinds of shifts do they effect on art histories established ways of studying and questioning the object?
Concentrating on lens-based media works, the paper considers the motives of artists for disclaiming the visual in their work and it explores in what ways strategies of negation can be realised. I will look in particular at Derek Jarman's film Blue (1093) in which the viewer is given only one frame of a monochrome blue throughout the whole length of the film. However, despite the film's lack of conventional moving images, the spectator's experience remains a cinematic one and does not transmute into an audio play.
It is my argument that the disclaiming of the visual allows the audience to emerge-as an integral and performative part of the film, thus enabling us to rethink spectatorship and its performative nature. Drawing upon performance theory, such strategies of disclaiming the visual might then open up the field of our enquiry to
the very act of looking at art, both as
spectator and art historian.
Friday 7 April, 14.00-15.30
Silvia Casini
Queens University, Belfast
• Medical Imaging Technologies in Art Practices: A New Way of Looking at the Body?
The paper examines the relationship between artists and scientists through the work of selected contemporary artists (Leidloff, Cooper, etc.) and focuses on the role of medical imaging technologies (X-ray, CAT scan, MRI) in their art.
The aim is to investigate under what respect the most advanced medical imaging technologies can be regarded by themselves as a radically different mode of looking at ourselves and at the world. If the camera was compared to a surgeon's knife by Walter Benjamin in that the camera operated similarly on the human body by seeing it in fragments and was thus able to penetrate deeply into its reality, the medical imaging technologies are the artist's knife to explore bodily perception.The question is the following: can the use of medical instruments made by the artists open up new forms of haptic visuality in opposition to the disembodied, clinical ones?
Do these artworks resist the colonisation
of the body's interior by medical image
technologies, the idea that the body can
be seen through completely without
damage and can be improved upon at
will? Is the body the locus of
experimentation, a place that is
evanescent, virtual, absent because it has
been phagocytised by prosthetic devices?
Maybe it is through the awareness of this
presence-absence of the body, through
this visible trace that these artists are able
to make us aware of our body and to
provide us with new perceptions of it.
Sarah Demelo
University of Essex
• Subject Matters: Intersections between Photography, Self-portraiture and Autobiography
In addressing the conference theme of new perspectives and approaches within art history, the aim of this paper is to explore the term 'self-portraiture' by examining intersections between literary and visual works, in particular those employing photography. By exploring self-portraiture through the guises of literary theory, one can broaden art history's understanding of the term. Literary theory defines 'self-portraiture' a* a metaphorical means of representing oneself, the resulting works being situatec outside the canonical boundaries of
autobiography. In short, some have arguei
that the 'self-portrait' is a text that is not
quite an autobiography. Similarly, one can
argue that contemporary self-portraiture
operates outside of the 'canonical
boundaries' established long ago by such
artists as Diirer and Rembrandt. The self i:
no longer a fixed, stable identity as
embodied in Renaissance self-portraiture
for example; rather, it is unstable and
decentred, allowing for a disjunctive
representation ot ones identity. Again, a
parallel emerges in contemporary self-
portraiture where artists have attempted
to represent this fragmented self, most
notably witnessed in the photographs of
Cindy Sherman.
My proposed paper will trace the emergence ot literary theory's appropriation and redefinition of the term 'self-portrait,' how art history can reclaim the term and what uses it may-have within art history. In reapplying the renewed term back into art historical discourse, the paper will posit new readings of the works of contemporary visual self-portraitists such as Nikki S. Lee. Sophie Calle, and Christian Boltanski.
Student Session: Who Do We Think We Are?
ACADEMIC SESSIONS
AAH 2006 Bookfair
We hope that you find time in the busy AA H conference to visit our Bookfair. The Bookfair is located in the Parkinson Court.The opening times are:
Wednesday 5 April 11.00-18.30
Thursday 6 April 10.00-20.00
Friday 7 April 09.30-16.00
Publishers Present
At the time of printing the following publishers have booked a space at the 2006 AA H Bookfair:
Apollo: The International Magazine of Art & Antiques Stand 6 www.apollo-magazine.com
Glamorous as well as authoritative in its coverage of the visual arts, Apollo is unlike any other magazine in the world. Lavishly illustrated, sharply written and always topical, it is essential monthly reading for everybody who enjoys painting, sculpture, the decorative arts, photography, architecture and interiors.
Ashgate Publishing Ltd Stand 12
www.ashgate.com
We are offering a 50% discount on all Ashgate titles on display. All of our recently published titles will be there for you to browse and buy. Do please visit us on the stand. And, if you have a book proposal to put forward, or you are an Ashgate author who wants to discuss your book, do take the opportunity to drop by and meet our team who will be attending the conference.
Axis Table 1
www.axisweb.org
Dialogue: new writing and
discussion online
Dialogue is a new quarterly art journal, hosted on the Axis website, engaging in constructive, critical discussion about artistic practice. Dialogue has been developed by Axis in collaboration with a rotating panel of external editorial advisors which currently includes Michael Con-is, J. J. Charlesworth, Gordon Dalton, Raimi Gbadamosi, Rebelcka Kill, Lisa Le Feuvre. Helen Sear, Gavin Wade and Jon Wood. Launched in December 2005, the first edition. "Economies of Expectation and Exposure', prompted discussion about the strategies adopted by and means available to artists in promoting their practice. The second edition, 'In Search of Research', will be online from April 2006.
Dialogue is one of a number of programmes available on the Axis website, the leading online guide to artists practising in the U K today. Other programmes include Graduates - profiling future talent from U K M A courses; Learning - inspiring projects and resources for art educators; Open Frequency significant U K artists nominated by a curatorial panel and Public Realm showcasing the best of the UK's public art commissions.
Blackwell Publishing Stands 1 and 2 www.blackwellpublishing.com www.blackwell-synergy.com
The Art History & Theory list at Blackwell Publishing is one of our most rapidly growing programmes. It embraces the best of traditional art historical scholarship as well as myriad interdisciplinary inflections. One of the world's leading society journal publishers, we are proud of our long-standing relationship with the journals Art Histor)' and Tlie Art Book.
The strengths of our art books list include the bestselling and time-tested Art in Theory anthologies, and recent years have also seen dramatic growth in areas such as modern art, contemporary art. museum studies and architecture. Please visit our stand to view our diverse and prestigious journals in your fields, and to take advantage ot your conference discount on our full range of new and classic books. We look forward to seeing you there!
Blackwell Publishing are kindly sponsoring the AAH 2006 Delegate Pack
University of Chicago Press Stand 3 www.press. uchicago.edu
The University of Chicago Press was established in 1891, making it one of the oldest continuously-operating university-presses in the United States. More than a century later, the University of Chicago Press is the largest American university-press, with a reputation for the publication ot distinguished scholarship.
The Press has three operating divisions — Books, Journals and Distribution Services. The Books Division publishes approximately 250 books a year and has published 11,000 books since its
founding. The Journals Division currently
publishes 44 leading journals and 5
annuals in the fields of social sciences,
humanities, biological and medical
sciences and the physical sciences.
Chicago Distribution Services provides
warehousing, fulfillment, and related
services to 46 professional and scholarly
publishers with over 30,000 titles in print.
It is also the home of two new initiatives,
the Chicago Digital Distribution Center,
which provides short-run digital printing
services, and the BiblioVault™ repository
for digital book files from scholarly
presses (www.BiblioVault.org).
Liverpool University Press Table 8
www.liverpool-unipress.co.ukk
Liverpool University Press (LUP)
publishes books and journals in the
humanities and social sciences, with one
of its key focuses on art and architecture.
As well as single titles, major series in this
area include the acclaimed Public
Sculpture ot Britain, an academic-
collaboration with Tate Liverpool (Tate-
Liverpool Critical Forum) and (new for
2006) Value-Art-Politics. LUP publishes
Sculpture Journal on behalf of the Public-
Monuments and Sculpture Association.
Manchester University Press Table 5
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Manchester University Press is well
known for publishing intellectually
rigorous and critically acclaimed
paperbacks in its Critical Perspectives in
Art History and Studies in Design series.
This year we are proud to announce the
publication of a cutting-edge theory-
book for students: An Histor)': A critical
introduction to its methods by renowned
authors Michael Hatt and Charlotte
Klonk.We also publish the internationally
acclaimed journal Visual Culture in
Britain, which aims to advance the
debates o f visual culture m Britain from the
eighteenth century to the present day.
BOOKFAIR
Merrell Publishers Stand 5 www.merrellpublishers.com
Merrell publishes books of the highest quality on all aspects of visual culture: fine art, the decorative arts, arts, architecture, design and photography.
Please visit our stand to enjoy a special discount for all delegates.
The MIT Press Tables 6 and 7 www.mitpress.mit.edu
New titles from The MIT Press include: Slavoj Zizek's Tlie Parallax I 'iew; Datia East: Tlie Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire by Tom Sandqvist; Tlie Manifesto Debate: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe edited by Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic;
The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Postlmman
Present to a Biocultural Future edited by
Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra.The
MI T Press is also pleased to announce
distribution of a new series of books from
Afterall.The first publications are: East Art
Map: Contemporary Art & Eastern Europe
edited by IRWIN; llya Kabakov.Tlte Man
Wlw Flew into Space from his Apartment by
Boris Groys; Bas JanAder: In Search of the
Miraculous by Jan Verwoert; Hottis Frampton
(Nostalgia) by Rachel Moore.
Forthcoming highlights include: Feelings Are Facts: A Life by Yvonne Rainer; Language to Cover a Page: Early Writings ofVito Acconci, by Vito Acconci, edited by Craig Dworkin;y4rf As Existence: Tlie Artist's Monograph and Its Projects by Gabriele Guercio.
Arts and Design journals from The MI T
Press include October, Grey Room and
Design Issues.
Oxfam Books Table 4
www.oxfam.org.uk
Oxfam Bookshop on Otley Road.
Headingley is one of the biggest
secondhand bookshops in Leeds and well
stocked with quality books on many
subjects. We offer a wide range of fiction,
non-fiction and academic books at
reasonable prices. Rare and antiquarian
books are available via our on-line sellers
at www.abebooks.com. Visit the Oxfam
website to find out more about Oxfam's
work to overcome suffering and poverty
in more than 70 countries.
Oxford University Press Table 3
www.oup.co.uk
Oxford University Press publishes a number of books and journals covering Art and Art History. Oxford Journals publishes several prominent journals in the field including the Oxford Art Journal,
Journal of the History of Collections, Journal
of Design History and Screen. Visit these journals online at:
www.oxfordjournals.org to read free
online sample issues.
Prestel Publishing Ltd Stand 11
www.prestel.com
Established in 1924, Prestel is one of the world's leading publishers of high quality, illustrated books on art, architecture, design and photography. This season's highlights include Encountering Eva Hesse edited by Griselda Pollock and Vanessa Corby and lavish catalogues on Marc, Bacon and Matisse.
Prestel Publishing are kindly
co-sponsoring the Reception
on 6 April.
Reaktion Books Ltd Stand 13
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
Reaktion Books are publishers of high-
quality books on the fine arts, design,
architecture, film, history, Asian Studies,
travel literature and cultural studies.
Routledge Stands 8 and 9
www.Routledge.com
Publishers of books and journals on Art, Art History, Design, Photography, Visual Culture and Aesthetics. Our prestigious journals include Early Popular Visual Culture, Digital Creativity and Visual Studies. Recent books include Tlieoty for Art History, Art History I 'crsus Aesthetics by James Elkins and Nicholas Mirzeoffs
Watching Babylon.
Thames & Hudson Ltd Stand 7
www.thamesandhudson.co.uk
Thames & Hudson is internationally renowned for creating beautifully produced and scholarly illustrated books.
Visit our stand to see some of the highlights of our current publishing programme, including titles on digital art. Surrealism and contemporary photography, and to find details of our full range of books.
University Presses Marketing Stand 4 www.universitypressesmarketing.co.uk
University Presses Marketing are the appointed sales representatives for a group of distinguished University and academic publishers from the USA and the UK . Visit our website for full access to our lists, to place orders, and request inspection copies and catalogues.
Yale University Press Stand 10 www.yalebooks.co.uk
Yale University Press is the publisher of distinguished books in the arts, and is the European distributor of publications from The National Gallery, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the The Art Institute of Chicago.
Conference Programme Inserts
are Provided by:
Berg Publishers
www.bergpublishers.com
Berg Publishers is a leading academic press in fashion, dress, design, media, film, cultural studies, food, anthropology, European history and politics. It is the official distributor of Fairchild Books, Left Coast Press and Seagull Books.
Eurospan Group
www.eurospangroup com
Eurospan Group are independent distributors and promoting agents for many US publishers including Stanford University Press and Penn State University Press. The cornerstone ot Penn State University Press' publishing is a range of impressive Art History titles that will whet your appetite for new books in this area.
Laurence King Publishing
www.laurenceking.co.uk
Laurence King Publishing publishes books right across the creative arts - on art, architecture, design, graphic design, film, photography, the decorative arts and craft. The books are authoritatively written, beautifully designed and produced, and provide information which the reader needs, whether as a student of art history or design, or as a professional
BOOKFAIR
architect or designer, or as an interested general reader.
Laurence King Publishing are kindly co-sponsoring the Reception on 5 April and will be announcing the winner of the John Fleming Travel Award during this event.
AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies
www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk
The Centre is a collaboration between the University of Essex, University of Manchester and Tate. Bringing together academics and museum curators, it aims to stimulate and lead discussion about the dada and surrealist movements and their influence on modern thought and culture.
Areas of research interest include relationships between surrealism and science, surrealism in Latin America, Japan and Australia, and the impact of dada and surrealism on post-war and contemporary art and theory. The Centre hosts a varied programme of events involving artists, museum professionals and scholars from diverse academic disciplines in order to encourage interaction between creative, historical and theoretical perspectives.
Tate Publishing
www.tate.org.uk/publishing
Tate Publishing is one of the world's leading publishers on the visual arts. Our aim is to bring the best new writing on art and the highest quality reproductions to the widest possible range of readers. Tate has been publishing since 1932, producing books on the visual arts that are authoritative, accessible and affordable, combining the latest scholarship with the highest quality illustrations.
Thomson Gale (Thomson Learning)
www.thomsonlearning.co.uk
Thomson Gale, part of Thomson Learning, is a global leader in reference publishing with an unrivalled collection ot library resources in electronic, print and microform formats. We create and maintain more than 600 databases including the Allgemeines Kiinstlerlexikon (World Biographical Dictionary of Artists Online).
Bookfair Floor Plan
Entrance
T 2 T 3 T 4
Multi-publishers table Oxford University Press Oxfam Books
S I Blackwell Publishing S 2 Blackwell Publishing S 3 University of Chicago Press S 4 University Presses Marketing S 5 Merrel Publishers S 6 The International Magazine of Antiques S 7 Thames &
S1 3 Relation Books Ltd S I 2 Ashgate Publishing Ltd S11 Prestel Publishing Ltd S1 0 Yale University Press S 9 Routledge S 8 Routledge Hudson Ltd
T 8
Liverpool University Press 21 Stands
T 7 T 6 T 5
The MIT The MIT Manchester
Press Press University Press
Library
FRAMING
S ART
'Entertaining, enlightening, and uncompromisingly clear... This is hands-down the most up to date, readable introduction to art theory available.' Benjamin Genocchio, art critic, The New York Times
January 2006
PB: 1 84520 464 6 £16.99
HB: 1 84520 463 8 £55.00
not available for sale in Australia New Zealand. Papua New Guinea and Fiji
Free p&p in the UK from
www.bergpublishers.com
Also available at all good bookshops or phoning +44 (0)1202 665432
For inspection copies please visit www.bergpublishers.com
Bookfair Floor Plan
Entrance
T 2 T 3 T 4
Multi-publishers table Oxford University Press Oxfam Books
T1
Axis
S I Blackwell Publishing S 2 Blackwell Publishing S 3 University of Chicago Press S 4 University Presses Marketing S 5 Merrel Publishers S 6 The International Magazine of Antiques S 7 Thames &
S1 3 Relation Books Ltd S1 2 Ashgate Publishing Ltd S11 Prestel Publishing Ltd S1 0 Yale University Press S 9 Routledge 8 8 Routledge Hudson Ltd
T 8
Liverpool University Press 21 Stands
T 7 T 6 T 5
The MIT The MIT Manchester
Press Press University Press
Library
FRAMING
H[ ART]
Michael Carter 2 Adam Geczy
'Entertaining, enlightening, and
uncompromisingly clear...
This is hands-down the most
up to date, readable
introduction to art theory
available.' Benjamin Genocchio,
art critic, The New York Times
January 2006
PB: 1 84520 464 6 £16.99
HB: 1 84520 463 8 £55.00
not available for sale in Australia New Zealand. Papua New Guinea and Fiji
Free p&p in the UK from
www.bergpublishers.com
Also available at all good bookshops or by phoning +44 (0)1202 665432
For inspection copies please visit www.bergpublishers.com
Art & Art History
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FABRICATING THE ANTIQUE
Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760-1800
Viccy Coltman
248 P., 5 COLOR PLATES, 85 HALFTONES
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EYESIGHT ALONE
Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses
Caroline A. Jones
544 P., 23 COLOR PLATES, 127 HALFTONES
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WHAT DO PICTURES WANT?
The Lives and Loves of Images
W. J. T. Mitchell
408 P., 16 COLOR PLATES, 84 HALFTONES,
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SWEET DREAMS
Contemporary Art and Complicity
Johanna Drucker
264 P., 16 COLOR PLATES, 32 HALFTONES
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DIPLOMACY BY DESIGN
Luxury Arts and an "International Style"
in the Ancient Near East,
1400-1200 BCE
Marian H. Feldman
272 P., 20 COLOR PLATES, 71 HALFTONES,
2 MAPS, 1 TABLE
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THE RHETORIC OF PERSPECTIVE
Realism and lllusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting
Hanneke Grootenboer
280 P., 24 COLOR PLATES, 1 HALFTONE,
PAINTING THE DIFFERENCE
Sex and Spectator in Modern Art
Charles Harrison
312 P., 50 COLOR PLATES, 130 HALFTONES
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BLOOD, MILK, INK, GOLD
Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance
Rebecca Zorach
352 P., 16 COLOR PLATES, 127 HALFTONES
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THE ARTEMISIA FILES
Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and OtherThinking People
Edited by Mieke Bal
245 P., 44 HALFTONES
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A MIEKE BAL READER
Mieke Bal
408 P., 40 HALFTONES, 2 TABLES
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THE BODY OF THE ARTISAN
Art and Experience in the
Scientific Revolution
Pamela H. Smith
408 P., 28 COLOR PLATES, 129 HALFTONES,
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THE NATURE OF PALEOLITHIC ART
R. Dale Guthrie
520 P., 20 HALFTONES, 847 LINE DRAWINGS
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THE OBJECTIVE EYE
Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art
John Hyman
300 P., 8 COLOR PLATES, 97 HALFTONES
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THE ARCHITECTURE OF AFTERMATH Terry Smith
280 P., 58 HALFTONES
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SELLING JERUSALEM
Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks
Annabel Jane Wharton
296 P., 78 HALFTONES
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THE INORDINATE EYE
New World Baroque and
Latin American Fiction
Lois Parkinson Zamora
424 P., 23 COLOR PLATES, 85 HALFTONES
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SHOOT!
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,
Cinematograph Operator
Luigi Pirandello
Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
With a Contribution by P. Adams Sitney
With an Introduction by Tom Gunning
CINEMA AND MODERNITY SERIES
240 p.
PAPER £11.50
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Art & Art History
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PERMISSIONS, A SURVIVAL GUIDE Forthcoming Fall 2006
Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual
WHEN BUILDINGS SPEAK
Property Architecture as Language in the
Susan M. Bielstein
Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath,
CHICAGO GUIDES TO WRITING, EDITING, AND PUBLISHING
1867-1933
172 P., 35 HALFTONES, 1 LINE DRAWING, 1 TABLE
Anthony Alofsin
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300 P., 158 COLOR PLATES, 52 HALFTONES
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THE POLITICS OF URBAN BEAUTY
for American Art New York and Its Art Commission
WINSLOW HOMER Michele H. Bogart
352 p., 85 HALFTONES
J Poet of the Sea
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Edited by Sophie Levy
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WONDROUS CURIOSITIES
Ancient Egypt at the British Museum
New from WhiteWalls Stephanie Moser
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26 Years of WhiteWalls
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THE LOOK OF READING
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Garrett Stewart
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ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTURAL
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Meyer Schapiro
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Journals from GJuccup-
American Art
Published tor the Smithsonian American Art Museum. American Art is an indispensable resource for scholars, collectors, and museum-goers who want to enrich their understanding of our nation*s art and culture.
Sample articles:
'"Artists" II omes & Studios; A Special Kind ot Archive**— a package of essavs discussing sites ranging from the Augustus Saint-Gaudens and N.C. Wveth estates to the Krasner- Pol lock house and stud> center. With an introduction and overview b\ Wanda M. Corn
"The Surreal Science of Soap: Joseph Cornell's First Soap Bubble Set"—Kirsten Hoving
"Serious Daughters: Dolls. Dress, and Female Virtue in the 18th Century"—Leslie Reinhardt
Winterthur Portfolio
Sponsored by the Winterthur Museum, this journal of American material culture publishes articles on the arts in America and the historical context in which they were developed.
The University of Chicago Press • Journals Division • P.O. Box 37005 • Chicago, IL 60637 w-vvvv. journals.uchicago.edu
ART F
THED
G TAL
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Art of the Digital Age
Bruce Wands
A lavishly illustrated survey of the way in which art has been radically transformed by digital techniques and media, featuring the work of over 100 artists at the forefront of this creative explosion.
232 illustrations, 218 in colour 27.5 x 23.0cm 224pp ISBN 0500 238170 £29.95 hb Publishingjune2006
All
No 1
First Works by 362Artists
Francesca Richer and Matthew Rosenzweig
An inspiring collection that showcases first works by some of the best-loved artists at work in the world today, including Frank Auerbach, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Cornelia Parker,Thomas Struth and Rachel Whiteread.
500 illustrations, 368 in colour 23.5 x 19.5cm 424pp
ISBN 0500 512671 £24.95 flexi
Publishing May 2006
Visiting Picasso
77je Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose
Elizabeth Cowling
'Penrose makes the perfect observer -a Samuel Pepys in the court of King Pablo' - Elizabeth Cowling
72 illustrations 23.5x172cm 408pp
ISBN 0500 512930 £25.00 hb
Publishing May 2006
Surrealism and the Politics of Eros
7938-7968
Alyce Mahon
'Opens entirely new ways into one of the major movements of the 20th century as well as into a period of dizzying social and political change'
- Christopher Green, Professor of the History of Art, Courtauld Institute
180 illustrations in colour and black & white 27.5 x 21.6cm 240pp ISBN 0500 238219 £29.95 hb
Art Since 1900
Modernism, Andmodernism, Postmodernism
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss.Yve-Alain Bois and
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
'Invests the art-history textbook with an unprecedented degree of critical intensity and intellectual ambition'
-ArtForum
637 illustrations, 413 in colour 27.7 x 21.6 cm
704pp ISBN 0500 238189 £45.00hb
The Artist's Yearbook 2006
All the information and advice you need
to get ahead in the UK art world
Edited byOssian Ward
'A dynamic and engaging reference tool'
- 77ie 77mes Higher Education Supplement
20.8 x 16.4cm 448pp ISBN 0500 285772 £16.95 pb
New Art from London
ChrisTownsend
After a decade of art revolving around sensation and celebrity, NewArtfrom London identifies the emergence of a more mature and motivated strain of artist at work in the city today,
148 colour illustrations 23.5 x 15.8cm 224pp ISBN 0500 28606X £14.95 pb
Publishing June 2006
Elj
At the Edge of Art
Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais
Surveying a broad range of work from scientists, designers, code-writers, video-games authors and internet artists, this book proposes fundamental and controversial redefinitions of art at the dawn of the digital age.
Over 500 colour illustrations 223 x 20.3cm
256pp ISBN 0500 238227 £19.95 pic
JlHlS BOAKUUAN
The World of Ancient Art
John Boardman An innovative study of the arts of antiquity across the globe, by one of the most eminent
academics in the field of ancient art.
Over 700 illustrations, 90 in colour 24.5 x 19.5cm 408pp ISBN 0500 238278 £40.00 hb
Publishing June 2006
vsrww.thamesandhudson.com
Conference Participants
Surname Forenames
Allmer Patricia Aloszko Stefan Applin Jo Armstrong Isobel Auerbach Anthony Bacci Francesca Baker Simon Bann Stephen Barchana-Lorand Dorit Barker Stephen Bauer Kaarina Beale Helen E. Beech Amanda
Beech Dave Benjamin Andrew-Berman Avis Bhaugeerutty Aruna Blackwood Jon Boal Iain A. Bouchier Martine Berrebi Sophie Berry-Francesca Brads treet Christina
Brzyski Anna
Bull
Malcolm
Bumpus Judith
Butt Gavin
Butt Gavin
Carman Jillian
Carruthers Vicky
Casini Sylvia
Cassar Ignaz
Checketts Richard
C:hoi Kyungee
Chow
Olivier
Clarke Meaghan
Colebrook Claire
Como
Alessandra
Costello
Diarmuid
Coupaye Ludovic
Courtney Cathy
Craven
David
Davidts Wouter
Demelo Sarah
Dimitrakaki Angela
D i Bello
Patrizia
Drobnick James R.
Dronsfield Jonathan Dumbadze Alexander Eaglestone Robert Eisenman Stephen Emerling Jae Endt
Marion
Escort Anthony-
Farago Claire
Affiliation Session
University o f Loughborough
i University of Plymouth
27 University ofYork u Birkbeck College, University of London 11 Independent Scholar 18 University of Oxford 4 University of Nottingham 13 University of Bristol Plenary The University of Haifa / Beit Berl College School of Art 20 University o f California, Irvine 10 Architectural Association, London 20 University of Stirling 4 Wimbledon School of Art S Sheffield Hallam University-18 University ofTechnology Sydney-I Independent Scholar, New York 25 University of Newcastle Upon Tyne 15 University o f Dundee 1 2 University of California at Berkeley 7 Ecole nationale supeieure d'architecture de Paris Val de Seine Louest 3 University of Amsterdam 9 University of Birmingham 2 Birkbeck College, University of London 4 University of Kentucky 17 Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford 8 Independent Scholar, London 25 Goldsmiths College, University of London 24 Goldsmiths College, University of London 21 University o f the Witwatersrand 12 University of Essex 4 Queens University. Belfast 27 University of Leeds 27
University of Reading 9 Wagner College / Hunter College, CUN Y 2 & 23 SOAS, University of London 1 2
University of Sussex 26
University ot Edinburgh 10
Washington State University-6
Oxford Brookes University-[ i
University ot East Anglia 12
National Life Story Collection, London 25
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
7
Ghent University
3
University o f Essex
27
University of Southampton
2
Birkbeck College, University- of London
4
University of Manchester
4
University o f Reading 1 0
George Washington University 4
Royal Hollow ay. University of London 10
Northwestern University
7
University ot California, Los Angeles
17
University o f Manchester
13
University of Plymouth
18
University o f Colorado, Boulder
17
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Surname
Feldman Filipova Fisher Fisher FoUin Fortin Foster Frost Furlong Gaiger Garza Usabiaga Giebelhausen Gilloch Goodell Graves
Halsall Hand Harris Harrison Heath Hernandez-Navarro Heuer Hodge Holmes Hudek Hughes Hummelen Huxtable Iversen Jachec Jackson Jacobi Janes Jeffett Jeffrey Jesse Jackson John Johnson Jones Jordan Juliff
Kadn
Kaina
Kaji-O'Grady
Kaminer
Kaszynska
Rear
Kirkham
Kokoli
Koureas
Kuenzli
Kwint
Lackey
Lane
Lang
Leeman
Lerm Hayes
104 CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Forenames
Hannah Marta Jenny Tony Frances Sylvie Nicola Charlotte Bill Jason Daniel
Michaela Graeme Jennifer Jane-Francis Janet Clare-Jonathan Joanne-
Miguel A
Christopher
Joanna
Kristy A.
Antony
Rolf
Ysbrand
Sallynne
Margaret
Nancy
Iain
Carol
Dominic
William
Celina
Matthew
Jennifer
Lewis
Amelia
Caroline
Toby
Raihan
Philippa
Sandra
Tahl
Patrycja
Jon
Anne-
Alexandra M . Gabriel Katherine M . Marius Samantha Richard J. Colin Richard Christa-Maria
Affiliation Session
Northwestern University 7
Edinburgh College of Art 23
York University, Ontario 15
University ot Essex 21
Independent Scholar 21
ART PAPERS 5
Suffolk College / University Campus Sutolk 4
Birkbeck College, University of London 21
Audio Arts 25
The Open University 20
Independent Scholar 6
Department of Art History and Theory, University of Essex 6
University of Salford 1
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 25
Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist, London H
Limerick College of Art & Design 5
Goldsmiths College, University of london 14
Pitt Rivers Museum 19
The Open University Plenary
University of Leeds 2
Universidad Catolica San Antonio de Murcia 15
Columbia University 8
Manchester Metropolitan University 10
Queen's University 22
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht 22
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm 3
Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage 25
University ot Bristol 4
University of Essex 14
Oxford Brookes University 9
University of Liverpool I V
Birkbeck College. University of London 22
Birkbeck College, University of London 4
Salvador Dali Museum. St Petersburg, Florida 13
Savannah College of Art and Design 12
University of Chicago 8
Humboldt University Berlin ;
Istanbul 26
University of Manchester
University of Leeds
University of Leeds 14
University of Essex 13
University College London 6
University of Technology. Syndey 3
Technical University Delft 3
Christ Church. University of Oxford 20
University of Kent 9
University of Manchester i 1
University of Brighton / University of Sussex 14
Birkbeck College, University of London 4
Wesleyan University -1
University of Oxford
University of Manchester 13
Malaspina Universityollege 1
Yale University 1
Institut national d'histoire de l'art. Paris 9
University of Ulster 23
Surname Forenames Affiliation Session
Lloyd Fran Kingston University 2
Lomas David University of Manchester 13
Loukopoulou Katerina Birkbeck College, University of London I
Luscombe Desley University ofTechnology, Sidney 6
Malik Arana Slade School of Art, University College London 12
Malvern Sue University of Reading 2
Manghani Sunil York St. John 26
Martin Ti m De Montfort University 3
Martindale Charles University of Bristol 11
Matheson Neil University ot Westminster 13
McClister Nell BOM B Magazine, New York 25
McKellar Leila University of Sussex 4
McQuillan Martin University of Leeds 10
Mechowski Amy Independent Scholar 2
Meltzer Eve Stanford University 8
Meskimmon Marsha Loughborough University 2
Miller Corinne Leeds City Art Gallery 15
Miller Charles AHR C Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacy, Univesity Essex i?
Minissale Gregory London Metropolitan University 12
Morgan ] )iane University of Leeds 1
Morra Joanna Central Saint Martins College of Art Design, London U
Neumeister Heike University of Central England. Birmingham / Hereford College of Art & Design 19
Newall Michael University of Kent 9
Nieftagodien Noor University ofWitwatersrand 25
Norman Elizabeth Retired, Sheffield Hallam University 26
Padiyar Satish Courtauld Institute of Art 21
Perchuk Andrew Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 8
Perks Rob National Sound Archive 25
Phillips Amanda Leeds City Art Gallery 15
Phillips Andrea Goldsmiths College, University o f London 3
Pietromarchi Bartolomeo Olivetti Foundation 15
Pillow Kirk E. Hamilton College, New York 1
Plock Phillippa Birkbeck College / University of Leeds
Podro Michael University o f Essex 20
PoUock Francesca DESS in clinical psychology (Paris VII) 14
PoUock Griselda AHR C CentreCATH, University of Leeds 2, 1
Prettejohn Liz University of Bristol 1 1
Preziosi Donald University ot Oxford 17
Proctor Robert Glasgow School of Art 25
Quinn Malcolm Wimbledon School of Art 18
Rampley Matthew Edinburgh College o f Art L6,
Rawlinson Mark University ot Nottingham 26
Rea Will University of Leeds I V
Reed-Tsocha Katerina University of Oxford 2:
Rees Helen University ot Manchester 24
Rehberg Vivian Independent Scholar / Journal ofVisual Culture 9
Richardson Michael Waseda University. Tokyo 13, IV
Richmond Susan Georgia State University 5
Ridgway Renee Visual Artist and Curator. Amsterdam V
Robinson Joel University ot Essex 6
Rounthwaite Adair ASCA. University o f Amsterdam
Sapir Itay ASCA, University of Amsterdam 16
Savage Polly SOAS. University o f London / October Gallery I V
Schade Sigrid Hochschule rur Gestaltung und Kunst Zurich 16
Schmidturkhardt Astrit Freie Universitat Berlin / Janus 9
Schoell Glass Charlotte University o f Hamburg 16
Scholte Tatja Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage 25
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Surname Forenames
Schwartz Frederic J. Scott Felicity D. Sears John Segal Eric Seiz Natalie Siopsis Penny Sisterson Paul Skipper Hayley Slade Lisa Sloan Rachel Smith Marqiurd Smith Royce W. Smith Terry Smithard Paula Speck Catherine Sprio Margherita Stallabrass Julian
Stankovic Nevenka Stanley Mike-Steinberg Michael Stimilli Davide Stokic Jovana Stowell Steven Stubbs Jeremy Summers Francis Summers Robert Syperek Pandora Szulakowska Urszula Szychalski Pawel Tate Sue-Thomas Morgan Thomas Morgan Timar Katalin Tuchman Phyllis Ursprung Phihp Van Schepen Randall K. Vandi Loretta
Vinzent Jutta
von Veh Karen
Wagner Anne-
Wainwright Leon
Walker Stephen
Wallach Alan
Walsh Claire
Way Jennifer
Weingarden Lauren S.
Welch Evelyn
Wieczorek Marek
Williams Richard J.
Williamson Beth
Winkenweder Brian
Wood Jon
Wright Lauren
Wrigley Richard
Zijlmans Kitty-
Zwijnenberg Robert
Affiliation Session
University College London 2 0 University of California, Irvine
3 Manchester Metropolitan University I University of Florida 6 Art Gallery of New South Wales / University of Sydney
5 University of the Witwatersrand
14 Manchester Metropolitan University
5 Wimbledon School of Art 18 Monash University
15 Courtauld Institute of Art 6 Kingston University, London
17 Wichita State University, Kansas 12 University of Pittsburgh
7
University of the Arts, London / University of Manchester
•4
University of Adelaide 2
University of Essex 2 !
The Courtauld Institute of Art
24
University of British Colombia I
Milton Keynes Gallery
15 Brown University 16 University of Colorado 16 New York University 2 University of Oxford 22 Ecole Pratique des hautes etudes, Paris University College for the Creative Arts, Rochester University of California, Los Angeles 22 York University, Toronto 22 University of Leeds 13 Lund University 3 University of the West of England 2 University of Canterbury New Zealand I 1 University of Canterbury New Zealand 19 Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art. Budapest I Independent Scholar, New York 25 University ot Zurich 3 Roger Williams University i Istituto Statale d'Arte Riccione 21 University of Birmingham 23 University of Johannesburg 2 University of California, Berkeley Plenary. 2 Manchester Metropolitan University '7 University of Sheffield 3 College ofWilliam and Mary 7 Birkbeck College. University of London 27 University of North Texas I Florida State University I Queen Mary. University of London 24 University ofWashmgton 8 University of Edinburgh 24 University of Essex 27 Linfield College, McMinnville 25 Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 25 London Consortium
15
University of Nottingham 26
University of Leiden 17
University of Leiden 17
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Art History and Theory from Blackwell Publishing - from the canvas to the classroom
ART HISTORY
Published on behalf of the Association of Art Historians
Editors: DEBORAH CHERRY & FINTAIN CULLEN
Art History isa refereed journal that publishes essays and reviews on all aspects, areas and periods of the history of art. from a diversity of perspectives. The journal has established an international reputation for publishing innovative essays at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship, whether on earlier or more recent periods. www.bUckwellpublishin9.com/ahis
ART HISTORY SPECIAL ISSUES
A subscription toArt History includes one thematic issue each year, also
available as part of the Art History book series. Recent titles include:
About Stephen Bann NEW Edited by DEBORAH CHERRY
This collection brings together distinguished contributors to reflect on the
writings of this internationally renowned scholar, and the profound effect they
have had on the fields of visual studies, an history and cultural history,
208pa9« / l-*051-4«rh6pb / April 2006
Between Luxury and the Everyday
Decorative Arts in Eighteenth