CONTEST/IT10NS Conference Programme & Book Fair Catalogue ••••••••••••••i 33rd Annual Conference Association of Art Historians 12-14 April 2007 University of Ulster Belfast Art History and Theory from Blackwell ART HISTORY Published on behalf of the Association of Art Historians Editors: DEBORAH CHERRY & FINTAIN CULLEN Art History is a 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.blackwellpublishing.com/ahis ART HISTORY SPECIAL ISSUES A subscription to Art History includes one thematic issue each year, also available as part of the Art History book series. Recent titles include: Location Edited by DEBORAH CHERRY & FINTAN CULLEN How important is location in producing, understanding, and curating art? 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'attl blackwell www.blackwellpublishing.com/art Y\H toTj Publishing CONTESTS TIONS Conference Programme & Book Fair Catalogue 33rd Annual Conference Association of Art Historians 12-14 April 2007 University of Ulster Belfast 33rd Annual Conference We welcome our distinguished keynote speakers, session convenors and contributors, panel members, delegates, colleagues and friends to the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, in Belfast for the 33rd Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historian. It is the first annual conference of the Association of Art Historians to be held in Northern Ireland, and it coincides with a crucial moment in the transformation of post-conflict society here. The opportunity to reinstate the Northern Ireland Assembly has raised the prospect of a continued dialogue across political, religious and social divides and for self-determination with the potential to enhance the well being and prosperity of the region in the longer term. the theme of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, relates directly to the specific 'post-conflict' situation of Northern Ireland. Belfast is a city in which both material traces and representations of competing historical formations are strikingly evident in everyday life. There has been a tradition of contests and contestations inscribed in British as well as Irish culture and representation, and at a global level, contestation defines the present situation in which various interests, intentions and investments clash and grapple with each other. Besides the location of the event, the host's institutional identity and educational mission also inform the conference theme. As a School of Art and Design we characterise our particular focus on practices of visual and material culture, their social contexts, historical circumstances and theoretical frameworks as 'engaged creativity'. This approach takes account of current shifts in dominant models of art practice, and corresponding multi-and interdisciplinary analyses of their historical formation , cultural, economic and political situatedness. Introduction Evolving from the specific conditions of Northern Ireland and with a view to the wider world, it acknowledges and promotes the active role that art and design as material thinking, and creative in(ter)vention has played, and continues to play in recognising and withstanding conflict, in the difficult processes of conflict resolution and the re/generation of civil society. Identity, national, regional and collective, and subjectivity, the inscription of forces of sexuality, gender, ethnicity and place in individual lives, marks all cultural processes. Available resources and traditions of representation shape, maintain and can radically reconfigure identity and subjectivity. Today, from the conditions of accelerated cultural and social change brought about by global capital and digital technologies of production, reproduction and organisation, new modes of literacy are emerging that put the very concept of representation under pressure. Mediation, dynamic encounters, interactivity and inter-and transdisciplinarity are now familiar buzzwords in academic and cultural policy speak. Occupying the various disciplinary fields of study of cultural production, consumption and circulation , they indicate, nevertheless, a genuine response to the conditions of the present moment. What, however, does practical engagement with such ideas involve for us as professionals in our various disciplinary approaches to art and culture: historical, material, theoretical and critical? One thing for sure is that it will involve contestation, contestation of histories and memories, of templates and methods of engagement, of perspectives taken and foci employed. In any case, the theme Contestation should be understood as a call to witness, a 'demand' to take a position and as an encouragement for constructive debate. In this sense we wish you all a stimulating and thought-provoking event. We hope you will enjoy your stay in Belfast and discover new vistas that make you want to return to the region for further exploration of its cultural wealth and natural beauty. Conveners.Uam Kelly.Christa Maria Lerm Hayes_Kerstin Mey_Alison Rowley Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Mark Ainsworth. Untitled, 2005 Aisling O'Beirn. Apartment, Collage, 2006 Alastair MacLennan. Untitled, 2005 Alastair MacLennan. Untitled, 2006 Aisling O'Beirn. Apartment, Collage, 2006 Patricia Belford. Interface, UU; Helen Storey Foundation and Prof. Anthony Ryan, University of Sheffield, Wonderland, 2006 Brian Connolly. Turning Point, Bronze Globe with four figures in St. Anne's' Square, Belfast, Commissioned by the Belfast Development Office & Department for the Environment N.I., in 1992 Patricia Belford and Ruth Morrow. Girlie Concrete", 2006, exhibition shot Interface: Fabric Forward. Masterclass: Contemporary Souvenir, 2006 Dan Shipsides. Elastic Frontiers (The Big Cheese), 2006 Patricia Belford and Ruth Morrow. Girlie Concrete", 2006, detail Bbeyond and Boris Nieslony. Operation Ambassador, Belfast, 2007 Interface: Call Centre Initiative. Mission I of Space Shuttle: Pass Odyssey - Space Walk, Belfast, 2006 Nuala Rooney. Untitled, 2006 Common Culture (David Campbell and Mark Durden). Local Comic - Simon and Lou, 2006 Philip Napier and Mike Hogg. Untitled, 2006,1 confess that I was there...exhibition shot, Interface, Switch Room, Belfast Brian Connolly. Untitled (Dublin Port Commission), 2000 Sarah Pierce. Monks Garden, 51st International Venice Biennale, Irish National Pavilion, June 2006 Pavel Buchler. Old, Rare and Unusual Roses, Return Gallery, Goethe Institut Dublin, 8 December 2006-17 January 2007, curated by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, University of Ulster, installation shot Brian McClelland, Liferoom Dissection Series, # 4, 2006 Deepak Kausal. Himmeli, 2005 Susanne Bosch. Untitled, video still, 2006 Nuala Rooney, Untitled, 2006 Common Culture (David Campbell and Mark Durden). Bouncers, 2006 Interface: Fabric Forward. Contemporary Souvenir I and II, workshops, 2006 Michael Moore. High Shoulder, 2005, acquired for the permanent collection of the National Museum of Ireland Alastair MacLennan. Untitled, 2005 We would like to thank all artists who have provided us with images of their work for inclusion into the programme. Copyright for the images resides with the artists. Many indMduals and institutions have supported the organisation of this conference, and we are grateful for their efforts towards making the event a success. We are indebted to the initiative of our former Head of School, Professor Hilary Robinson, now Dean of Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, USA, for seizing the opportunity for the School of Art and Design to host the conference. The University of Ulster has generously provided premises without charge, equipment and technical support. The School of Art and Design and the Research Institute Art and Design have both made substantial financial contributions towards the realisation of the conference and the social framework programme. The administrative aid of Helen Dowie in the Research Institute has been invaluable. Interface: Centre for Research in Art, Technologies and Design lent staff support and technical equipment; special thanks go to Ramakant Sharma for his technical expertise. The technical services management of David Simpson and Debbie Mitchell have been essential for the smooth running of the technical aspects of the programme. We would also like to thank our student helpers and session invigilators. We are highly indebted to the concerted efforts of Elizabeth Partridge and her colleagues at the Belfast Visitor and Convention Bureau for the promotion of the conference and for dealing with the logistics of accommodating the delegates in a city that has become a sought after conference venue. We are grateful to Caterina Laverty and the staff at the Europa Hotel, to Robert McKenna and The Streat caterers, to AEL audio-visual suppliers, to The Black Box, and to Karen Brown, Amanda Croft and the Naughton Gallery of Queens University Belfast for their contributions to the realisation of the programme in its fullness. We warmly express our gratitude to the Executive Committee of the Association of Art Historians for the steadfast guidance they have offered the organisers in the planning process. Jannet King, was very efficient and always helpful with the job of compiling entries for the Bulletin. In particular we would like to acknowledge our sincere appreciation of the generous support, steady encouragement and unfailing good humour that Colin Cruise as Chair of the Committee has afforded the convenors of the conference. Without Clare Davies and her extensive experience of administering the rich and complex international gathering that is the Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, organising Contestations would have been impossible. We thank her for her meticulous attention and calm rigour, qualities that have both kept us on our toes and kept us going when the going got tough. Finally, we thank all those who volunteered to organise sessions at the conference. Their considerable input in and professional approach to directing the debate has been essential for the success of this event. We also appreciate the contjiburjons offered by all the speakers and thank them for their efforts and participation. Conference Organisers Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes Liam Kelly Kerstin Mey Alson Rowley Conference Administrator Anne McNei Contents _ Session 1 _12 'We Capture the Walls': Politics and Twentieth-Century Muralism Jody Patterson, University College London Warren Carter, University College London Session 2 _18 Irish Studies and History of Art: Impossible Dialogues? Lucy Cotter, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam Session 3 _24 Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis in a Post-Traumatic World Griselda Pollock, CentreCATH, University of Leeds Session 4 _30 Photography between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art. Hilde Van Gelder, K.U. Leuven Helen Westgeest, University of Leiden Session 5 36 Contesting Forms, Testing Functions: Encounters between Sculpture, Decoration and Design Martina Droth, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Session 6 _42 Makers and Making: Between Trauma and Representation Vanessa Corby, Faculty of Arts, York St John University Elsa Chen, Department of French and Francophone Studies, UCLA Session 7 50 Painting workshops of the (17thcentury) world: Grounds for Contestation Shane McCausland, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Session 8 54 Questioning Authority: Commercialisation and the Academic Ideal in Eighteenth-Century European Art Camilla Smith, University of Birmingham Shearer West, University of Birmingham Sessions Session 9 60 Immaterial Culture? Things, Artefacts and Meanings Deborah Sugg Ryan, Loughborough University Timo de Rijk, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands Session 10 66 Representing the Monster City: Art History and Pathologies of Urban Development 1800 - 2007 Richard J Williams, School of Art, Culture and Environment, University of Edinburgh Guillaume Evrard, School of Art, University of Edinburgh Session 11 _70 Globalisation and Art since 1945: Disciplinary Renewal or Transformation? Jonathan Harris, Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts (CAVA), University of Liverpool Session 12 _76 Contested Histories in German Visual Culture 1871-1990 Debbie Lewer, University of Glasgow Christian Weikop, University of Sussex Session 13 _82 Contested Evidence Matthew Sillence, University of East Anglia, Norwich Amelia Yeates, University of Birmingham Session 14 88 Museums and the Construction of Art Histories Chris Whitehead, Newcastle University Bemadette Buckley, Newcastle University Session 15 92 1968: Activist Art and Its Legacies Jill Carrick, Carleton University, Ottawa Session 16 98 Contesting Childhood Anna Green, University of East Anglia Norwich School of Art and Design Vivien Northcote, Independent Scholar _ _ Session 17 _106 History and Class Consciousness and Art History Gail Day, School of Fine of Fine Art History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds Steve Edwards, Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Open University Andrew Hemingway, Department of History of Art, University College, London Session 18 _112 Common Identities? From Post-Identity Discourse to Concepts of Communality and Participation in Contemporary Art Benjamin Greenman, University of Essex Merav Yerushalmy, University of Essex Session 19 _116 Toward A New Age of Asian Art Ming-Hui Chen Loughborough University School of Art and Design Session 20 122 Beyond Recognition: The Outer Limits of Artistic Creation and Critical Reception after September 11, 2001 Christopher Bedford, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art Jennifer Wulffson, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Session 21 J 26 Taking to the Streets: Art and the Architecture of Security and Control Liam Kelly, School of Art and Design, University of Ulster Session 22 130 Contesting the Body: Art, Sexualities and Biogenetics Fae Brauer, The University of New South Wales/University of East London Anthea Callen, University of Nottingham Conference Opening / Plenary Lectures / Presentations /Receptions / Round Tables / Thursday 12_04_07 Guided Walking Tour - Thomas Andrews' Belfast 14.00 - 15.30 Meet outside Belfast's City Hall Please note that this replaces the Tour of the Custom House (which is no longer accessible) Film Screening 16.00 - 17.30 Fourth Dimension Produced and directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha University of Ulster's Belfast Campus New Lecture Theatre Rm 82B01 Conference Opening Plenary Lecture 18.00 - 19.00 Europa Hotel Ball Room Keynote Speaker Trinh T. Minh-ha Civic Reception 19.30 - 21.00 Harbour Masters Office Corporation Square Film Screening 21.00 - 23.00 Night Passage Produced and directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha Black Box Studio, 18-22 Hill Street, Cathedral Quarter Friday 13_04_07 Meet the Editors 11.00 - 11.30 Blackwell Book Fair Stand University of Ulster's Belfast Campus - Foyer AAHAGM 13.15 - 14.15 University of Ulster's Belfast Campus The meeting is open to all members of the Association of Art Historians, whether or not they are delegates at the Conference. Guided Tour of Belfast Murals 14.00 - 16.00 Pick up point outside the University of Ulster's Belfast Campus Plenary Lecture 18.00 - 19.00 Europa Ball Room Keynote Speaker Ashish Rajadhyaksha Blackwell Reception 19.00 - 20.30 Europa Hotel Ubrary Bar Other Events Saturday 14 04 07 Brian Maguire Workshop 9.30-13.00 University of Ulster's Belfast Campus Rm 82A31 Special Interest Group Meetings 13.00-14.00 University of Ulster's Belfast Campus Students and Independents Rm 82A02 Universities and Colleges Combined Students and Universities Groups Rm 80B11 Museum and Gallery Group discussing Change of group title; Benchmarking the Opposition: VAGA, the Museums Association and the European Curators Group Rm 82C01 Reception and Lunch 13.00 - 14.30 Naughton Gallery, Queens University Susanne Bosch Talk 14.00 - 15.30 Ex-Yugoslavia: Looking at creative-transitional concepts in neighbouring countries University of Ulster's Belfast Campus Rm 82A31 Guided Tour of Titantic Quarter 14.00-15.30 Meet outside Belfast's City Hail Donegall Square Plenary Lecture 18.00-19.00 Europa Hotel Ball Room Keynote Speaker James Elkins Finisage - Reception 19.15 - 21.00 University of Ulster's Belfast Campus Featuring Soundscapes by Paul Moore and Co Sunday 15_04_07 One day tour of Giant's Causeway and North Antrim Coast 9.00-17.00 Pick-up and drop off point: University of Ulster's Belfast Campus Two day tour to Dublin dpt Sunday 9.00 rtn Mon 20.00 Includes receptions of National Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Chester Beatty Library, the Hugh Lane Gallery and other art venues. Exhibition - throughout the conference Inspiration to Order Curated by Rebecca Fortnum University of Ulster's Campus Foyer Association of Art Historians Delegates wishing to join or to enquire about joining the AAH will be able to do so at the Registration desks. If you require further information after the Conference, please contact AAH Senior Administrator 70 Cowcross Street London EC1M 6EJ Tel 0207 490 3211 Email admin@aah.org.uk www.aah.org.uk Conference Dinner 20.00 - 23.00 Europa Hotel 12th Floor Dining Room General Information Orientation The conference will take place in two central venues in Belfast - The School of Art & Design, University of Ulster, York Street and the Europa Hotel, Great Victoria Street. Please see map on page 8 of this programme. Conference Registration Registration will take place at Belfast campus of the University of Ulster, at York Street. The Registration Desk will be situated just inside the main entrance. Registration will take place on Thursday 12 April from 12.00 ­ 17.30 and between 9.00 -17.30 on Friday 13 April and Saturday 14 April. Book Fair The Book Fair will take place at the Belfast campus of the University of Ulster, at York Street. Thursday 12 April 12.00 — 18.00 Friday 13 April 9.00 — 18.00 Saturday 14 April 9.00 — 18.00 Lunch and Refreshments Packed lunches will be provided for delegates at the University of Ulster, at York Street on Friday and Saturday (also at the Naughton Gallery Reception from 13.00 — 14.00 on Saturday 14 April). Tea and coffee will be available during the morning and afternoon breaks at both conference venues (University campus and Europa Hotel). Conference Dinner The conference dinner will take place at 20.00 on Friday 13th at the Europa Hotel. Delegates must have pre-booked to attend the dinner. Dress code will be business casual. Recommended Restaurants Apartment 2 Donegal Sq West Belfast 028 9050 9777 Bourbon Grill 60 Great Victoria Street Belfast 028 9033 2121 Cayenne Ascot House Shaftesbury Sq. Belfast 028 9033 1532 Deane's Brasserie 34—40 Howard Street Belfast 028 9033 1134 Ginger 7—8 Hope Street (off Great Victoria Street) Belfast 028 9024 4421 The Grill Room Ten Square Hotel 10 Donegall Sq. Belfast 028 9024 1001 James Street South No 21 James Street South Belfast BT2 028 9043 4310 Mourne Seafood Bar 34—36 Bank Street Belfast 028 9024 8544 Nick's Warehouse 35-3 9 Hill Street Belfast 028 9043 9690 Olio Restaurant 17 Brunswick Street Belfast 028 9024 0239 For more information about restaurants, cafes and pubs visit www.gotobelfast.com (Activities/Things to do/Eating out). Getting around Belfast It is quite easy to get around the city by foot, bus or taxi. Buses For information on getting around Belfast by bus: www.translink.co.uk/metro.asp Taxis There are black taxi ranks outside the Europa Hotel and on Donegal Square North (in front of the City Hall). Please note that black taxis can be flagged down in the city, but private taxis cannot. Taxis (private) Value Cabs 028 90 80 90 80 Fonacab 028 90 33 33 33. Walking Street maps will be provided in your delegate's conference packs. Tourist Information For more information about Belfast visit the official tourism website for Belfast is rrttpyAwww.gotciberfast.corn/ Useful Telephone Numbers Police Emergency 999 Non-emergency 0845 600 8000 Hospitals Belfast City Hospital Switchboard 028 9032 9241 24 hour Accident and Emergency helpline 028 9031 4314 Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) 24 hour helpline 028 9024 0503 Doctors To find your local doctor (for non-emergency services) call the Central Services Agency 028 9032 4431 Out of hours doctor 028 9074 4447 Dentist For immediate relief of pain contact Outpatients at Belfast City Hospital 028 9032 9241 or Bradbury Dental Clinic B-4 Bradbury Place 028 9022 2444 Open 08:30 - 17:30. Closed Sat, Sun. Pharmacies Harrison Healthcare C-3 Donegall Pass 028 9032 0059 www.hanisonhealthcare.co.uk. Open 09:00 - 18:00, Sat 09:00 - 13:00. Closed Sun. Business Facilities Mailboxes Etc 47 Botanic Ave 028 9024 7888 Belfast Concierge 50 Mount Michael Park 028 9070 2121 www.belfastconcierge.co.uk Central Translations 60 Stewartstown Pk 028 9062 2839 www.cwtTBl-translatioris.co.uk. Flex Language Services University of Ulster, Jordanstown, Newtownabbey 028 9036 6546 M.McCurdy@ulst.ac.uk/flex. Translations. The Photograph as Books on art and culture from Contemporary Art Charlotte Cotton ISBN 978 0500 203804 £9.95 pb Thames & Hudson Berlin Art Wow Photographs by Jim Rakete Text by Mark Gisbourne ISBN 978 0500 286470 £24.95 pb Berlin in the 20s ArtandCulture 1918-1933 Rainer Metzger ISBN 9780500513545 £24.95 hb Courbet Linda Nochlin ISBN 978 0500 286760 £16.95 pb Writing on the Wall Word and Image in Modern Art Simon Morley ISBN 978 0500 238110 £29.95 hb Colour in Art JohhGage ISBN 978 0500 203941 £9.95 pb Women, Art, and Society Fourth Edition Whitney Chadwick ISBN 978 0500 203934 £12.95 pb Design and Landscape for People New Approaches to Renewal Clare Cumberiidge and Lucy Musgrave ISBN 9780500 342336 £29.95 hp Image Makers, Image Takers The essential guide to photography For further details of our list, news of events by those in the know and special offers, visit us online at Anne-Celine Jaeger "*^>- Thames & Hudson www.thamesandhudson.com ISBN 978 0500 286623 £17.95 pb Jody Patterson, University College London Warren Carter, University College London Session 1 'We Capture the Walls' Politics and Twentieth-Century Muralism Muralism is a centuries-old practice that stretches back to Antiquity. Yet in terms of its twentieth-century manifestations, the precedent set by los tres grandes is pivotal for locating the mural as a site of contestation. Whilst the Mexicans looked back to the Renaissance in terms of technique and the accessibility of the medium, the murals they produced were intrinsically linked to a more overtly radical political project. Although the radical ideals of the Mexican Revolution may have been compromised, the artists commissioned by the subsequent regimes were clearly committed to bringing art to a broader and more inclusive audience outside the conventional confines of the bourgeois art market. As such, the Mexican example has served as an important model for a diverse constellation of twentieth-century mural practices attempting to circumvent the restrictive parameters of autonomous art. Seeking to wrench art from its ivory tower, instances of such practices range from the murals created under the auspices of the New Deal art projects to those linked to nationalist struggles in Latin American and Belfast. As Orozco claimed in 1929: "The highest, the most logical, the purest and strongest form of painting is the mural...It is for the people. It is for ALL." This session addresses the mural as a vehicle for the communication of issues and ideas across a wide spectrum of aesthetic, political and cultural registers. Papers will examine muralism from a diversity of historical and theoretical perspectives in an effort to encourage a dialogue around the mural as a strategy for circumventing market forces and critiquing standard frameworks of institutional patronage. Christopher Fulton University of Louisville Siqueiros Against the Myth: Four Paeans to Cuauhtemoc, Last of the Aztec Emperors In the decade of 1941 -1951, David Alfaro Siqueiros executed four murals of Cuauhtemoc, last of the Aztec Emperors. Each of these represents a particular reflection on the modern relevance of the noble ruler and courageous defender of Tenochtitlan, and as a series they reclaim the figure as a vital symbol for the post-war era. The partings operate on multiple levels of meaning and bring together the disparate strands of Siqueiros' radical thought. It is suggested here that his excogitation of the murals led him to a better definition of his stance against the technocratic capitalist order, and enabled him to perceive the close alignment of his artistic and political rebellions. The artist identified psychologically with his subject, and the example of Cuauhtemoc's undaunted resistance to prodigious forces and false beliefs inspired Siqueiros to assert his own convictions in unmixed terms, as exemplified in his inflammatory book, No hay mas ruta que la nuestra. Also considered in this paper is the relationship between the four murals and major social and political currents. This is explored with reference to Siquieros' anti-Fascist activities, political exile from Mexico, affiliation with the labor movement, and problematic association with Presidents Cardenas and Aleman. In this way, we see that the artist's personal struggles in theory and practice reflected the predicaments of the radical Left at mid century. Warren Carter University College London Justice for Artists: New Deal Murals and the Constitutional Revolution 1937 The job of decorating the recently constructed Justice Department building in Washington, DC. was the first major commission that the Treasury Section of Painting & Sculpture received in the capital. As such, it was here that the Section administrators consolidated their working methods and established their relationship with radical artists; the academic Commission of Fine Arts; and a largely conservative and unsympathetic press. The period in which the decoration for the Justice building was conceived, finalized, and executed - from early 1935 through to late 1937 - was also the moment in which the New Deal policymaking elite in Washington were engaged in a protracted war of attrition with the Republican appointed Supreme Court. Whilst FDR's resounding electoral success in 1932 seemed to pave the way for fundamental and comprehensive political and economic reform, all the major legislative attempts at dealing with the crisis passed during the 'First Hundred Days' were then overruled and rejected accordingly. The aim of this paper is to use the Section murals in the Justice building to explore the complex and shifting relationship between the more liberal elements of the New Deal coalition seeking to push through a progressive reform agenda: a conservative dominated Supreme Court committed to a form of laissez faire constitutionalism; a newly created Section of Painting and Sculpture looking to entrench itself as a permanent bureaucracy; and young radical artists energized by the mural movement south of the border and eager to decorate the walls of federal buildings with New Deal propaganda. Jody Patterson University College London Towards a Radical Realism: Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in New Deal New York During the 1930s, under the auspices of Roosevelt's New Deal administration, the mural underwent a significant transformation in the United States. No longer viewed as an art form believed to serve a purely "decorative" purpose, and supported by a comprehensive program of federal patronage, the mural emerged as the most vital manifestation of a revolutionary popular art for left-wing artists during this period. In line with Dewey's progressive belief in the need for a "democratization of culture," muralism served as an exemplary means of bringing art to the people. While the murals created by leftists during the New Deal era are largely associated with the aesthetic of Social Realism, there existed an alternative form of radical muralism predicated upon modernist formal developments. This approach, which found its most sophisticated visual and theoretical treatment in the work of Stuart Davis, eschewed the art of illustration and propaganda and. instead, engaged an abstract visual vocabulary. Taking cues from Leger's "New Realism" and demonstrating important affinities with Brecht's experimental "epic theatre," this type of realism was firmly grounded in the urban vernacular and elements of mass culture, such as jazz, advertising, and cinema. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the aesthetic and political potential of a realist mural art which, while abstract, was understood to be "popular, collective and contemporary." J 4 Session 1 'We Capture the Walls' Politics and Twentieth-Century Muralism Janice Anderson Concordia University Rereading Tradition: Revealing Disorderly Practices in the Interstices of the Conventional Mural Working from the understanding of space as a politically discursive field, within which meaning is both constructed and reiterated, I will discuss mural painting by Canadian women from two perspectives. First, I will consider the literal and symbolic meanings of public and private spaces, addressing particularly the trope by which women are relegated "by nature" to the private and men are assigned to the public. I will suggest that women's mural paintings have marked their presence in public both in the literal sense of the word and in the symbolic sense in which such incursions signify an insistence upon inclusion. Second, the epic topics to which mural paintings are often dedicated parallel important signifiers for the control and propagation of knowledge. In the two cases I will discuss, the murals are dedicated to science and medicine, two primary sites for the manipulation of highly valued skills. I will examine the mural Endocrinology, painted by Marian Scott (1906­1993) for McGill University in 1943, and I will discuss Mary Filer's (1920-) The Advance of Neurology, painted for the Montreal Neurological Institute in 1954. I will look beneath the surface of these two works to explore the liminal spaces in which they exist ­that is, within the conservative historical tradition of Canadian mural painting and simultaneously in the far more significant space that marks women's works in public as political acts. Functioning in a state of tension, the murals neither completely fit the mid-twentieth century tradition nor exist outside it. Maria von Bonsdorff University of Helsinki Reflecting the Past and the Future - Finnish Mural Art at the Turn of the Twentieth Century At the end of the nineteenth-century Finnish artists began to express an interest in monumental decorative schemes covering vast surfaces. This was linked to the growing sense of patriotic identity. For those countries which had not yet gained independence, like Finland, it became particularly important for them to raise their profile with a distinctive culture of their own. The 1900 World Exhibition in Paris provided a welcome first forum for their efforts. And with the emergence of the European idea of a renewal of art Finland began to look back to their artistic traditions and their genuine folk art. Hence favourite themes tend to be the life of the people, myths, legends and the native landscape. The Finnish artists based in Paris formed a close-knit community. The friendship between Axel Gallen, Pekka Halonen and Eero Jarnefeft grew into a 'brotherhood'. The mutual understanding among the artists was strengthened in the political upheaval of the 1890's as the Russian nationalists aimed at abolishing Finnish autonomy. As the decade neared its end, the political climate grew increasingly oppressive in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Finnish art became a important form of resistance and a fervent affirmation of Finland's national identity in the shadow of Tsarist Russia. The patriotic-minded artists embarked on a quest to discover the 'lost ancient culture' of Finland from Karelia, the Eastern province, where the oral tradition of the Rnnish national epic, the Kalevala was still alive. The big difference from the European national romantic art is that the Rnnish artists decided to choose the modem, synthetistic mode for their mythological, symbolistic and political art. They consciously chose a modem approach for their Kalevala inspired art which took its form from the monumental art of the Primitive periods such as Egyptian and especially Early Renaissance, which they studied in the Louvre and later in Italy. It was significant that the new art was to be the art of the future, the 'Nordic Renaissance' of which Gallen and Halonen were writing about. Adopting 'archaic' techniques like tempera and colours resembling fresco painting, the artists aspired to something eternal and permanent. Central perspective was replaced with a two-dimensional, decorative surface. This Baudelairean attitude is related to a particular experience of modernity, which is characteristic of the modern period as distinct from other periods. 1 his duality is well represented also in Finnish art in the 1900s. The relationship between subject, and technique, or means of representation, was a persistent concern for Finnish artists. Their modern, mural art sought to be a mirror of simultaneity linking time and reflecting the past in the future and vice versa. Joseph McBrinn University of Ulster Picturing the Nation: Identity and Politics in the Irish Mural Revival, 1922-59 In the period following the Partition of Ireland in 1922 there was a widespread revival of interest in mural art by painters, proselytisers and politicians. This paper reconsiders the modern mural movement in Ireland, concentrating on developments in Dublin and Belfast in the 1920s-50s. Analysis of the Irish Free State, later the Irish Republic, Government's and the Northern Ireland Government's mural commissions for imperial and international exhibition buildings of 1920s-30s and for State buildings of the 1930s-50s reveals a complex system of propaganda and censorship centred on debates concerning national, regional and imperial identities. These murals (by leading Irish artists such as William Conor, John Luke, Brigid Ganly and Sean Keating) reveal the influence not only of the techniques and styles of Renaissance models but also of the State mural commissions of the 1900s-30s at the Palace of Westminster in London. Contemporaneous with the emergence of such State-sponsored murals in Ireland was a renaissance not only in church mural painting but also in gable wall painting. Irish murals of this period, although frequently dismissed or downplayed, often had deep, radical meanings, narratives, contexts and resonances which includes clear aesthetic and ideological affinities with the work of the New Deal and Mexican muralists of the 1930s and after, which saw the fusion of painting as an individualist creative practice and mural art as a public discourse for all. Mural art made a crucial contribution to key debates of identity, and on wider issues, in Irish society at large in the 20th-century and given the longevity of the medium, which has continued into the 21 st -century, its significance cannot be underestimated. William Rolston University of Ulster From War to Peace: Issues in the Transformation of Political Wall Murals in Northern Ireland Since the republican and loyalist ceasefires of 1994, much has changed in Northern Ireland. This paper seeks to examine the specifics of transformation in relation to political murals. At an early stage, republican muralists removed the most blatant paramilitary imagery in their murals, to the point that the only guns apparent now are historical rather than contemporary. Republican muralists have always had a range of themes on which to draw for inspiration, so that there has not been a lack of possibilities of issues to which their murals can continue to refer. Loyalist murals have been slower to shift from a dependence on a narrow range of paramilitary imagery. Paradoxically, the intensity of this imagery increased after their ceasefire. Consequently loyalist muralists have been under intense pressure from outside to change. However, given the inseparability of the murals from the paramilitary groups which commission them, such change could not occur in the absence of wider changes within loyalism. Furthermore, given that inseparability, it has been difficult for loyalist muralists to imagine what they might paint other than hooded men with guns. Recently the pressure has been increased from two sources: first, a debate within loyalism regarding the need for political transformation, and second, the availability of generous government funding for 'reimaging' loyalist areas. As a result, developments in relation to loyalist iconography are now apparent which in the longer term could lead to the murals being more representative of the wider needs and aspirations of the loyalist community. Leonard Folgarait Vanderbilt University Respondent Lucy Cotter, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam Session 2 Irish Studies and History of Art: Impossible Dialogues? The relationship between Irish Studies and History of Art disciplines remains a contested one, despite an increasing amount of cross-research and publishing by academics in both disciplines. On the one hand, art has remained an area of marginal interest to Irish Studies. One might ask whether this status relates to historic associations of Irish culture as essentially non-visual or to the perceived internationalism of modern and contemporary art. On the other hand, art historians have been slow to engage with Irish Studies, which is perceived as having a literary bias, and a methodological approach in which art is subservient to theory. Beyond disciplinary differences, the relationship between Irish Studies and Irish History of Art is underscored by divergent views on the status of the 'national' and the 'postcolonial' within Irish cultural production. Within Irish art discourse, the 'national' is often perceived as reductive in its isolation of Irish art from international art discourse and apparent focus on a culturally essentialist 'Irishness'. The post-colonial status of Ireland and its relevance for art historical research are widely disputed. Focus is rather on the formal influences of European and British art on individual Irish artists. In contrast, 'national' and 'postcolonial' referents are central tenets of Irish Studies discourse. This session brings the disciplines' discrepant conceptions of Irish cultural production, and of the place of art and visual culture within it, to bear on each other. It reflects on the objectives and methodologies of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary encounters and teases out some areas of discourse which are opened up, expanded, silenced or displaced in the process. Fintan Cullen University of Nottingham Irish Visual Studies and Interdisciplinarity Ten years ago, I expressed a hope that the time was right 'for the visual arts to take their place around the table of Irish cultural studies.' What has happened in the succeeding decade? Given the ongoing literary and historical dominance of Irish Studies, this paper will argue that the interdisciplinary approach is possibly the only avenue open to serious visual studies. As a discipline, the foundations of the History of Art are in History and as such it could be argued that we should maintain that connection. Collaboration can thus only strengthen the discourse. At the same time, an equally important area of investigation is how well the profile of Irish art studies has fared in the international arena. Is it seen as a legitimate topic in the History of Art or just part of Irish Studies? In an attempt to answer these questions, I will focus on my present research which concerns Access and Display: viewing art in Ireland 1750-1950'. The aims of this study are to discuss and examine access to and the display of visual material in Ireland and amongst the Irish diaspora during the period. This can only be done by engaging with Irish Studies and by a dialogue with theories of display and exhibition histories in Europe and North America. James Elkins School of the Art Institute Chicago Between National Art History and International Visual Studies Irish art history, despite many changes, remains focused on its national heritage and its English, and Anglophile, background. I worked and wrote against that during my three years in University College Cork, taking the position of "outsider" (North American), and arguing that the English past from the Grand Tour to Palladianism was disproportionately represented in curricula. A focus on the history of the nation and region is entirely appropriate for smaller countries, but it runs the risk of becoming an unarticulated perpetuation of older methodologies and an older sense of the discipline. Attempts to broaden the discourse by appealing to Ireland's new status as a globalized country with a new population of immigrants can sound superficial or irrelevant. For such a practice, visual studies can seem coarse in its substitution of abstract discourse (like this abstract!) for concrete instances of objects with resonance for nationalism. The challenge for art history in Ireland is at least threefold: to respond to the international interest in visual studies: to adjust its implicit senses of nationalism to those in Irish studies, Politics, and History; and to find ways of addressing Irish art criticism, art theory, and art practice — all of which have been increasingly, precipitously, international. Kerstin Mey School of Art and Design, University of Ulster Histories of Art and Inter/national Discourse I would like to intervene in the discussion about the relationship between Art History' and Irish Studies by looking a) at the historical role the emergence and developments of disciplines has played in the intellectual and ideological landscape in Western Europe and beyond. From there I would like take the briefest of looks - by way of comprison - at the relationship between the history of East German Art (1945 - 1990) and German Studies. An observation similar to the Irish situation can be made to the under- and misrepresentation of the visual arts in historical accounts of a no-longer existing national entity, East Germany. I will argue that within the complex cultural situation there are a number of interrelated reasons that have complicated a thorough investigation of this area of cultural production within and beyond disciplinary confines. In their generality, they are as follows: a) the principal instrumentalisation of almost all visual art by the State for a representation to of national identity and claim to power; b) a suspicion leveled against visual images based on their perceived accessibility by the 'masses'; c) analytical instruments and critical approaches at the forefront of revisionist constructions of histories and narratives developed predominantly in areas outside of Art History, and with other cultural practices and products in mind, such as literature and film for instance; d) the tight grip of notions of modernism on the critical debate in and beyond art history, which rendered most of the post-war art production East of the river Elbe obsolete; e) crucially, the desire by the dominant cultural powers to establish and affirm their position within the prevalent Western model(s) and values of art and culture. From there the paper will propose the development if finer tuned instruments with a transdisciplinary - rather than interdisciplinary perspectives - through and for multidisciplinary discourse^), that draw out the politics and powers of locations for the re/construction of inter/national and 'g/local' histories of visual art production, dissemination and consumption. Lucy Cotter, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam Session 2 Irish Studies and History of Art: Impossible Dialogues? Luke Gibbons University of Notre Dame Visual Culture Cultural Boundaries and Irish Studies Is there something about the image that eludes the national, or indeed all cultural boundaries? Recently, some critics in Ireland have tended to construe the image as free from all historical moorings, unless freighted by 'extra-visual' linguistic or literary content. One of the implications of this is that the visual culture has no role to play in Irish Studies, thus perpetuating the stereotype that where images are concerned, no Irish need apply. In this discussion it will be argued that it is precisely the dualism of word and image, politics and the aesthetic, history and form, that gives rise to such limiting visions: ironically, constraining the image in the name of universality. Gavin Murphy Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology Unsanctioned Transgressions: the limits of Irishness in the works of Willie Doherty and Gerard Byrne The uneasy position of contemporary art in Ireland within the discipline of Irish Studies can be attributed, in part, to the contrast of the popular notion of the artist as an unfathomable trickster with the methodical rigour and virtues associated with academic scholarship. There are echoes here of Freud's idea of an inherent conflict between instinctual pleasure and civilization where the latter is built on a steady renunciation of the former. Indeed, the ideological drive of Irish Studies can be traced to the efforts of those wishing to define Irishness in terms of civility against equally politicized definitions of barbarity that have dogged the national project. It is the intention of this paper to examine the artworks of Willie Doherty and Gerard Byrne in the light of this tension. Doherty's video installation, Non-Specific Threat, dwells on a latent violence and the spectre of criminality characterizing the post-conflict scenario in Northern Ireland. It centres on the figure of the 'hood' now unleashed from standard political frameworks that have governed an understanding of violence in the North to reveal an uncharted challenge to the new social order. In the case of Byrne, Herald or Press is a film work re-staging a series of panel discussions around aspects of the sexual revolution published in Playboy magazines in the late sixties and early seventies. A sense of dislocation colours the work. It is re-enacted by contemporary actors set in a modernist pad (with its Utopian associations) in Wicklow. There is the additional disjunction where the topic for consideration in the gallery space finds its origins in a magazine associated with more immediate bodily gratification. The techniques of distantiation at play in the show arise from these temporal, geographical and cultural fissures. Both artists have been selected to represent Northern Ireland (Doherty) and Ireland (Byrne) at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. The works of both artists are also thoroughly informed by international visual art discourse whilst retaining a localized dimension. Their work can thus be viewed in relation to the collapse of the European vanguard ideal, fresher definitions of neo-avantgrade art practice, and, the problematic contours of multiculturalism. As such, they stand as useful case studies of cultural practice in Ireland that resist easy assimilation into the standard discourse of Irishness. Indeed, far from the idea of the unfathomable trickster, each artist can be seen to articulate a complex dialogue that challenges the very foundations on which art historical and critical discourse in Ireland rests. Let Irish Studies deal with that. This paper stems from a commissioned essay for Circa magazine examining the role of Irish representations at the Venice Biennale. This is due to be published prior to the exhibition. Fionna Barber School of Art and Design History, Manchester Metropolitan University Disturbed Ground: Francis Bacon, Traumatic Memory and the Gothic This paper is an attempt to situate fresh readings of the work of Francis Bacon in relation to the formation of the Gothic in Irish culture. The relationship between figure and ground in Bacon's work has frequently been read in terms of the dissolution of identity, however the fragmentation of the self in relation to the destabilising effects of the Gothic provides further interpretative possibities. This is suggested by aspects of the artist's biography: much of his early life was spent in a succession of houses in Co. Kildare. My intention is to explore the extent to which Bacon's paintings of interiors with figures can be seen to evoke the uncanny spaces of the (lost) Big House, a recurrent trope emerging also in Gothic form within Irish literature. Rather than suggesting nostalgic recollections of childhood, these paintings evoke a traumatic memory of a space in which fundamental aspects of the painter's psychosexual identity are constituted. By the time Bacon's interiors with figures began to take shape in the 1940s, however, Anglo-lrishness had been largely outmoded as both class and culture. As both site of traumatic memory and anachronistic cultural formation, the figuring of Anglo-Irish domestic space remains an important area of exploration in Francis Bacon's paintings. Niamh Ann Kelly Dublin Institute of Technology Between Art and History: Remembering the Great Irish Famine A traditional method of approaching a subject in historical art is to chronologically account its development over a stated period of time, and within a finite set of locations. By charting the subject or theme in this way, art history presumes upon a dubious principle of conventional historical practice, such as is exemplified in most museums: the reliance on physical evidence as proof. This paper will explore how the materialism of conventional museum practice raises profound conundrums for historical remembrance and collective memory, particularly within the context of popular subjects in so-called Irish Studies. The very lack that predetermined the famine in mid-nineteenth century Ireland, the impoverishment that sustained it and the absence it subsequently created, on bodily, material, and geographical levels is apparently impossible to describe in its own terms. So, the difficulty of representing the famine in both museum and cultural forms has been addressed by various strategies of reference, comparison and personal testimony, microcosmic presentations and poetics. Addressing how this 'Irish subject' has been explored through art, it has become apparent to me that the imaginative function of art may be core to developing more equitable representations of history than those that dominate official state histories today. While this has emerged in the course of research on a specifically Irish subject, it is also clear to me that to present such outcomes as a thesis within Irish Studies would deny a fundamental conclusion of the research, which is certainly not relevant only to Ireland. Riann Coulter Paul Mellon Centre tor British Art Nationalism, Homosexuality and the Modern Artist: Suppressed Narratives in Gerard Dillon's Images of Connemara To date, readings of Gerard Dillon's paintings of Connemara have focused on the artist's romantic attitude to the people and landscape of the western seaboard. While Dillon's self-proclaimed nationalism supports these readings, further scrutiny of paintings including Sunday Afternoon, On the Beach and Boys Catching Crabs suggests an alternative homoerotic narrative that effectively subverts the nationalist agenda traditionally associated with images of the west of Ireland. Arguably, the obsession with constructing a national canon that preoccupied both artists and art historians in Ireland for much of the 20th century, combined with a socially conservative environment that suppressed homosexuality, has resulted in the failure to recognise, or acknowledge, the homoerotic content of Dillon's work. The aim of this paper is to expose those suppressed narratives and explore how the conflict between Dillon's homosexuality and his nationalism is expressed through his paintings of Connemara. As Colin Graham has argued, in the process of imagining the nation, post-colonial movements 'excluded, dominated, elided and oppressed' minority and marginalized social groups whose histories still have to be written. Drawing on Graham's rethinking of Irish studies along subaltern lines this paper argues that the obsession with national identity that has, until recently, characterised both Irish Studies and Irish Art History has resulted in limited readings of 20th century Irish art and a failure to recognise those identities, other than the national or international, that artists have expressed through their work. Yvonne Scott TRIARC, University of Dublin, Trinity College What is/are Irish Studies? The title of this paper, and the question is raises as to the correct application of the verb, indicates the role of Irish Studies as a collection of disciplines each with a separate as well as a collective identity. The issue addressed here is about the constituent parts and their interrelationships. Regardless of the desirability or otherwise, there is a perception that art history/visual culture is not treated in practice as a self-contained and separate domain, but rather is either ignored or is subservient to literature, history and politics within the broader discipline of Irish Studies in third level institutions internationally. This paper explores the evidence for or against this perception which has been largely based on anecdotal evidence, in order to provide a context for the questions of interdisciplinary exchange. It seeks to raise, and possible to answer some of the relevant questions: what could and does Irish Studies consist of? How significant, collectively, are such courses and to what level are they pitched? What is the geographic spread and why were they established? What issues are addressed and to what extent to they explore common interests such as notions of Irishness and identity, nationhood, diaspora/emigration, race and immigration, colonialism and empire, post-colonialsim and globalization? To what extent do conferences directed to Irish studies mirror this structure? Panel Discussion Chair Lucy Cotter Panelists Karen Brown, History of Art, Queens University Eoin Flannery, Cultural Studies, University of IJmerick Victor Merriman, Irish Studies, Uverpool Hope University Vera Ryan, History of Art, Crawford College of Art and Design _24 Griselda Pollock, CentreCATH, University of Leeds Session 3 Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis in a Post-Traumatic World Many activists in post-traumatic societies resist the psychologisation of conflict survivors because this appears to allow pathologisation of individuals to displace the collective weight of the political. In a contrary direction, some formerly very Foucaultian thinkers about discourse and power have latterly embraced what Judith Butler acknowledges as 'the psychic life of power'. Yet a third strand of trauma and memory studies openly espouses a psychoanalytical model for dealing with major historical traumas such as the Holocaust. Building on the expanding interest in Aby Warburg's early 20th-century attempt to conjugate a social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analysis of the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of western modernity, this panel presents a varied range of papers dealing with several historical moments or cultural geographies that explore the continuing tensions between the psychoanalytically theorised dimensions of resistance, contestation and transformation and the social processes and representational economies in which these are forged and intervene. At the contested intersection of post-colonial critique, analysis and aesthetics of transformation and those of an international feminist theoretical and practical inclination, this panel will explore the relations between the political with the psychoanalytical mediated via the image in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. Suzanna Chan University of Ulster Race, Psychoanalysis and the Middle Passage: Ellen Gallagher at the Freud Museum Race, as Stuart Hall contends, is now used under erasure. Materialist analyses of its genesis in early capitalism and its divisive function in class structured by capitalism abound, while Frantz Fanon and others established analysis of its psychic dimensions. Superseding a constructionist focus, Kalpana Sheshadri Crooks uses psychoanalytic terms to examine how 'race' is fundamental in-our thinking, and deepen an understanding of its historical operations. As she contends, in the regime of chattel slavery in the Southern States, 'race' nullified the incest taboo, separating kin from slaves on the basis of racial dis/similarity. The master could breed with impunity upon slave women and the children begat thereby, thus enacting the fantasy of Freud's primal father of the original horde, whose demise is at the origin of moral law. Looking to the artist's affinitive engagement with and subversion of Freud's analysis of the psyche, this paper will consider Ellen Gallagher's 2005 installation, Ichthyosaurus, at the Freud Museum. Finding affinity with Freud's early research in marine biology, Gallagher communicates to his anatomical drawings of the lamprey through her specimen jars containing fantastical creatures reminiscent of the mythical Drexciya, said to have evolved from those drowned by murder and suicide from the slave ships of the middle passage. Yet she frames the figures problematically, as objects of scientific study. In her "Watery Ecstatic" drawings, Gallagher intimates the unrepresentability of the trauma of the middle Passage of slavery, while imagining the drowned evolving into a form of other than human marine life. Gallagher's 16mm films reference the Afrofuturist ecstatic survivalist Project of a futuristic post race subject from outer space exemplified by Sun Ra, though focussing on a post-human marine life beyond death. Considering Ichthyosaurus as a work of cultural resistance, this paper will examine its en9agement with psychoanalysis, the trauma of the middle passage, and psychoanalytic elucidation of the traumatic operations of 'race'. Kristin Huneault Concordia University Miniature Objects of Cultural Covenant: Transition and Translation in British North America Critical scholarship on miniature paintings suggests that these tiny objects, with their special articulation of boundaries, are "quintessentially about the oscillation between self and other" (Pointon, 2001). In this presentation, I will suggest that such complex oscillation sheds new light on the psychic freighting of representational practices in the context of traumatic loss and transition characteristic of colonial societies. Among the numerous paintings to chart the path of empire on the walls of the Royal Academy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fully half of the portraits of non-European sitters were miniatures. Two North American examples are the portraits of the Mohawk warrior and diplomat Teyoninhokarawen, or John Norton, and the Ojibwe minister and diplomat, Kahkewaquonaby, or Peter Jones. In the circumstances of their commissioning and execution, in the history of their exchange and circulation, and in the material and representational qualities of the objects themselves, these portraits exemplify the miniature's special dialectic of attachment and separation. They present compelling negotiations of the boundaries of the self at a time when the material foundations of Aboriginal identity had been taken or destroyed, and when survival seemed to hinge on assimilation to the way of life of an other whose rhetoric of friendship was upheld even in the face of betrayal and usurpation of resources. Using the psychoanalytic concept of the transitional object together with postcolonial theories of translation. I will argue that these miniatures functioned - quite unexpectedly - as covenants, tangible pledges of mutual connection across the gaping maw of cultural difference and colonial violence. Emily Mark FitzGerald University College, Dublin The Irish "Holocaust" and the Commemoration of Famine Since the early 1990s the Irish Famine has been the subject of extensive commemorative programmes across the Irish diaspora, including the erection of over sixty public monuments, in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the Famine. Ranging from simple community-led commemorations to complex public artworks in excess of € 4 million, the rapid monumentalisation of Famine in recent history is intimately connected to global paradigms of traumatic memory, and contemporary discourses of historical trauma and psychoanalysis. Evidence of this shift includes the development of the 'Famine curriculum' in the U.S. which teaches the Famine alongside the Holocaust and African American slavery, the revival of genocidal arguments with respect to British culpability for the Famine, and the publication of personal 'memory' narratives ensconced in the language of post traumatic stress disorder. This paper will explore the manner in which traumatic discourses have impacted upon the form of the Famine's commemoration, both textually and visually, and to question the political context of their hegemony. As Andreas Huyssen has astutely observed, the emergence of Holocaust commemorative archetypes has also irrevocably affected the visual language of global memory practices, and the Famine is no exception. Examples of commemorative work from Ireland and the U.S. will support this paper's assertion that historical trauma has functioned as a definitive (if restrictive) framework for engaging with Famine memory and remembrance. _26 Griselda Pollock, CentreCATH, University of Leeds Session 3 Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis in a Post-Traumatic World Sharon Sliwinski McMaster University Transfixed: The Expression of Emotion as a History of Images In his introduction to here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs, Michael Shulan suggests that the events of 9/11 call for the revision of a familiar expression: "Seeing is not only believing. Seeing is seeing." Inspired by Shulan's perplexing phraseology, my paper uses the here is new york archive to investigate the significance of the body's mimetic registration of traumatic events. In the case of 9/11, a distinct expression of transfixion—a kind of stupefied amazement in which one or both hands are placed over an opened mouth or grasp some part of the head—can be found among the photographs of people on the streets of New York that infamous September morning (fig. 1 -2). My investigation of the repeated gesture consists of two prongs. First is the mystery of the expression itself: What is the significance of this extraordinary shared reaction? How can we interpret its genesis and how is it preserved in the psychical archive that is memory? And what can the expression tell us about the event known as 9/11, what Jean Baudrillard called "the 'mother' of all events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have never taken place"? The second aspect of my inquiry involves the mystery of the recurring image, the curious—one might say compulsive—rendering of this expression into yet another impression, namely, the photograph. Given the repeated appearance of such records in the here is new york archive, perhaps the representation can be read as an artistic motif, a kind of symptomatic sign. But following Aby Warburg's thought, what are the implications of folding the psychology of human expression into a history of images? Gabriel Koureas Birkbeck College The Psychic Life of a Divided Cfty: Visualising space in Nicosia How does the dMded city of Nicosia that has been scarred by war and ethnic conflict, a conflict that left an open wound in the space of the city, try to heal the wounds and incorporate the traumatic memories in the spatial parameters of the city? Is such incorporation possible? This paper will concentrate on the personal and public space as defined by a divided city and the role such representation plays in defining a national narrative. The paper will attempt to question ways in which the two communities, Turkish and Greek, define their psychic spatiality and the consequences of such definitions on the conflation of the personal, the local and the communal. By concentrating on the writings and work of women artists the paper will argue that the psychoanalytic spaces created by their work provide a link between representation and agency but most importantly question and critic the totalising nationalist and masculine discourses prevalent on the island. In order to investigate further these questions this paper will examine in more detail the visual language of the city of Nicosia in relation to issues of space, borders - both physical and psychic - memory and trauma and their interaction with hegemonic and personal narratives. The paper will conclude that it is only by understanding the psychoanalytic impact of trauma and abjection that one can begin to comprehend the political and social condition in the city of Nicosia. Paula Carabell Open University Surveillance Society and the Notion of the Uncanny Surveillance, once the realm of disciplinary control (e.g. Bentham's Panopticon), has become part of everyday life, with Britons captured on tape no less than 300 times daily. Terrorist threats, in particular, have rendered such visual scrutiny a necessary and even accepted part of our cultural geography. What effect, however, does this scopic invasion have on self and social perception? Is it experienced as a traumatic invasion of personal boundaries or rather, does the near omnipresence of CCTV cameras render surveillance an innocuous element in our daily routine? I would like first to contend that the prominence of the self as visual construct within a surveillance society gives rise to a psychological tension that rehearses the conditions of Freud's notion of the uncanny. The re-production of the indMdual within cultural space creates an experience that is at once both familiar and strange, creating a split between self as self and self as other. I will further maintain that this dialectic has been reified through the phenomenon of reality television, particularly the case of Big Brother, which serves both to articulate and to normalise a psycho-social model of self, which is based upon the depersonalising effects of constant scrutiny. Olivier Chow Independent Scholar Exception, Subjection, Abjection: The Relations of Torture at Abu Graib This paper investigates the visual politics of torture, focussing on the visual culture of Abu Ghraib. We shall view torture as a relation. Foucault argued that torture was originally a relation between a sovereign and its subject. Nietzsche argued that it was a relation between creditor and debtor. Others have argued that it was ultimately a relation between human and god. In any case, torture was considered in the pre-enlightenment context as fitting within a "general economy": that is within culture. It was a spectacle with a purpose: to demonstrate the power of the sovereign, the shattering force of the law on the body of the subject. Torture has now moved out of sight and been phased out of the "general economy". Welcome to the realm of the exception: a zone of indistinction between law and violence, inside and outside, exclusion and inclusion, life and death. Abu Ghraib reveals a space of concentration and digestion where subjects are included only on the basis of their exclusion, transformed into faecal and formless matter. Abu Ghraib has created a radically new space beyond all relation - or arguably before all relation: a state of abject symbiosis and regressive attachment - symbolised by the image of Lynndie England holding a detainee on a leash. The smiles of Abu Ghraib - ignoble jouissance if there was ever any - embedded in our memory by disposable cameras have further twisted this already perverted relation: torture has now become a joke and a prank. Henrik Ole Holm National Gallery of Art, Copenhagen Contest-nations Resistance to analysis is a common problem. If cultural analysis of a visual politics of psychoanalysis knows the diagnosis, and performs the talking cure needed, post-traumatized cultures worldwide could be the very last to bother, due to the very reactions defining their illness. The reactions of a traumatized person are scale jumped into nationalistic rhetoric providing a seemingly efficient way of dealing with post-traumatic feelings in society. Hence the title contest- nations of this paper, where I will explore the relation between politics (nationalism) and psychoanalysis (of a culture directed by individuals) in the ongoing contest on who's in charge of the future for controlling the power of imagery, society and politics. The photographs from Abu Ghraib held the promise of defeat for the Alliance in Iraq, sending governments in the US and Britain on a detour. An inferior nation as Denmark became breaking news causing widespread riots in the Muslim world when a newspaper launched cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. At the same decisive moment the Danish government made public a canon for the arts, in order to ward off globalisation anxieties. Perhaps visual arts possess the power to penetrate resistance, analysis and politics just running after them to gain control of the remainder? Griselda Pollock CentreCATH University of Leeds Not Forgetting Rwanda: Alfredo Jaar Between 1994 and 1998 Alfredo Jaar undertook a series of over twenty projects relating to the trauma of the genocide that took place over 100 days in 1994 in the small African country of Rwanda. Despairing at the possibility that any photographic strategy could adequately respond to the catastrophe that had occurred 'under Western eyes,' Alfredo Jaar's repeated efforts to engage with the subject while acknowledging each project in some profound way to be a failure in representational politics, invites a range of interpretations from the political to the psyctoaratytJcal. Jaar's work appears address questions of the possibility of representation catching both an indexical relation to an event that happened and marking the trauma politically caused by a failure of adequate acknowledgement of and speedy response to what was happening registered through tracking the active forgetting of the world's media. In coming after the event, in a belated registration of the genocide, Jaar's work ultimately addresses the question to the spectator of his work displacing the indexicality of the photograph to the virtualisation of trauma aas the event the spectator must be made to experience. This leads to his more recent work, The Sound of Silence which addresses the politics and ethics of photo-journalism in relation to another photographer's award winning work in the Sudan, the response to which may have brought on the suicide of the photographer. Jennifer Tennant Jackson Leeds Metropolitan University Courbet's Trauerspiel: Trouble with Women in the Studio. The painting, Courbet's Studio , is frequently read politically because the artist is a socialist; or so the books tell us. Even though the full title, "The Painter's Studio: a real allegory causing a period of illness of seven years of my artistic life", hints at an allegorical translation, if the art work is read allegorically it is always in a political context, that of post 1848 revolution, where it becomes a coded commentary on the rule of Emperor Napoleon III. The painter's studio is thus a world stage: the people in it merely political players. Alegory, here, is symbolic; dead people from a lost age. Alegory can be read otherwise. Walter Benjamin's study of Trauerspiel acknowledges an allegorical form where death is accepted as part of life: life as political and as psychic trauma. Understanding Benjamin's analysis of these German mourning-plays can provide us with a remarkably useful approach for thinking post-traumatically, especially with regard to the troubling representation of such events. In this paper I suggest that an allegorical reading of I'Atelier as a mourning play, as Trauerspiel, recovers the traumatic element lost in previous readings. The trauma, almost tangible in the play of paint on canvas, moves metonymically in the troubled forms of Courbet's women. They are ideal and fragmentary, appearing and disappearing in space and time. The wounded artist struggles with the trauma of his loss. The Studio as allegory is not a direct representation; here Realism moves into allegory. This paper rethinks the studio as Trauerspiel, as mourning on stage, played out over time as a constellation of ideas that construct the lost 'object', the (non) representational figure of trauma - Virginie Binet, and Courbet's son. Hilde Van Gelder, K.U. Leuven Helen Westgeest, University of Leiden Session 4 Photography between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art The ambition of this session is to examine a recurrent question in the recent literature on the use of the photographic medium in contemporary art. It concerns the multiformity of the use and ways the photograph manifests itself in diverse artistic practices today. Central to the debate is the question whether photography has a hybrid or chameleonic character because it can be part of entirely different multimedia/mixed media works of art, such as the combination of photographs and text, photography in painting, slides in video installations, digital photographs in computer art, photographs in installation art, etc. Or does the photo-image nowadays mainly serve as a useful tool to make a renewed kind of 'tableaux', manifesting its 'pictorial autonomy' yet as such often being marked by a rather noncommittal and 'poetic' visual imagery? When photographic practices aim at raising a critical debate on the internal workings of the artistic system itself or on broader social problems, is the photograph then able to distinguish itself from a merely 'political' statement or a pamphlet? A wide variety of papers addresses these issues, either situating them in a larger theoretical perspective or departing from a case study. Sara Cochran Los Angeles County Museum of Art Party-On: class performance in contemporary British photography Looking at the work of artists such as Richard Billingham, Tom Hunter, Paul Smith, Sam Taylor Wood, Yinka Shonibare and Sarah Lucas, this paper will explore the diverse and ambiguous roles of class identification in recent British photography. Given the malleability of the photographic technique, the history of the medium has often been problematic. The use of photography as an ideological tool in the representation of race, gender and social issues is especially troubling. However, photography's flexibility is also central to a series of recent works that seif-consciously reflect changes in British society and question the nature and stability of the place of the individual within a class structure. Playing on photography's associations with documentation and the idea of its inherent veracity, these works present transient positions that do not necessarily reflect either social or individual realities. In many of these images, class identity is presented as a performance or parody rather than a sociological constraint or personal finality. In this way, the associations and tropes of class are posited as a means of personal expression and play. These artists draw on a double intellectual legacy: that of the politics of inclusion and distinction articulated within feminist, queer and post-colonial theory and the methodologies and practices of performance art and video art. The resulting images challenge the divide between public and private, reflecting the growing influenced of mass media and celebrity culture on British society and contemporary art in general. Liesbeth Decan K.U. Leuven Critical Realism in Belgian Portrait Photography and Painting of the 1980s This presentation investigates the conjunction of documentary photography and bare life — what philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as life stripped of political representation. How is it possible to document life that is defined by its unrecognized status, and what are the ethico-political ramifications of its aestheticization? Rather than conclude that photography can record such a condition—instantiated above all by the refugee, the exemplary figure of globalization—I argue that it is by drawing on the irreducible difference between aesthetics and politics that contemporary photography establishes its most compelling and poignantly questioning relationship to bare life. Considering the photography of Palestinian artist Ahlam Shibli, particularly her project that documents a community of Bedouins living in, but unrecognized by the state of Israel, this paper examines how Shibli's political wager— of representing the unrecognized—is paradoxicaliy but tellingly met with the acknowledgement of her subjects' resistance to representation. Instead of signaling a problematic contradiction, this tension announces the division of Shibli's project into what Jacques Ranciere terms the aesthetics of politics—whereby photography proposes to politics the creative rearrangement of its spaces, extending visibility to those who are excluded from representation—and the politics of aesthetics—according to which art defends the truth of its own representational structure and the autonomy of its imagination as a zone apart from the political world. It is my contention that Shibli's practice becomes radical where it critically correlates these two aspects, opening up photography's impossible relation to bare life, and bare life's resistance to representation. T.J. Demos University College London Photography and Bare Life This presentation investigates the conjunction of documentary photography and bare life— what philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as life stripped of political representation. How is it possible to document life that is defined by its unrecognized status, and what are the ethico-political ramifications of its aestheticization? Rather than conclude that photography can record such a condition— instantiated above all by the refugee, the exemplary figure of globalization —I argue that it is by drawing on the irreducible difference between aesthetics and politics that contemporary photography establishes its most compelling and poignantly questioning relationship to bare life. Considering the photography of Palestinian artist Ahlam Shibli, particularly her project that documents a community of Bedouins living in, but unrecognized by the state of Israel, this paper examines how Shibli's political wager— of representing the unrecognized—is paradoxically but tellingly met with the acknowledgement of her subjects' resistance to representation. Instead of signaling a problematic contradiction, this tension announces the division of Shibli's project into what Jacques Ranciere terms the aesthetics of politics—whereby photography proposes to politics the creative rearrangement of its spaces, extending visibility to those who are excluded from representation—and the politics of aesthetics—according to which art defends the truth of its own representational structure and the autonomy of its imagination as a zone apart from the political world. It is my contention that Shibli's practice becomes radical where it critically correlates these two aspects, opening up photography's impossible relation to bare life, and bare life's resistance to representation. Session 4 Photography between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art Simon Faulkner Manchester Metropolitan University David Reeb: painting, photography, occupation Since the late 1980s the Israeli artist David Reeb has made paintings of press photographs, translating the light and shade of images of the Israeli occupation into paint on canvas. In the process the 'eye-witnessing' enabled by the indexical nature of the photograph is exchanged for concerns with painterly composition and application. However Reeb's paintings necessarily retain an iconic relationship to the original photograph. Consequently the paintings are structured by a contradiction between photographic referent and painterly process, and between the visualisation of the occupation and the concerns of late modernist art. This contradiction between potentially political iconography and painterly poetics has been replicated in discussions of Reeb's work. Some critics have suggested that the paintings might allow Israelis to see images of the occupation with a 'fresh gaze', giving painting a meta-pictorial relationship to photojournalism. While Reeb himself declares the priority of aesthetic concerns in his work over the idea of political art. In contrast to these interpretations this paper suggests that Reeb's practice involves a form of reflection on the making of paintings in an occupying society where the art scene exists in such close proximity to military oppression. Photojoumalistic imagery is introduced into panting as a means of exploring the ethical conditions of making art within Israeli society. Reeb's work therefore uses photography as reference material in painting to consider questions about the relationships between art and politics in a way quite different to the approaches of those Israeli artists who have adopted photography as a critical artistic medium since the 1970s. Cliff Lauson University College London Jeff Wall's Cinematographic Photography Jeff Wall is widely recognized as both one of the pioneers of large-scale photography and with inventing the transparency in lightbox format. Working against the instantaneousness of the snapshot and the tradition of documentary street photography, Wall restages everyday events and narrative scenes into 'near­documentary' tableaux. Also one of the pioneers of seamless digital montage, Wall is an artist whose practice focuses on picture making, not photo taking. This paper will consider the critical divide over the claims made for the medium of photography by Wall's work. On the one hand, Benjamin Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss have sharply criticized Wall's pictures for being facile re-reinterpretations of old master paintings, arguing that his use of the medium fails to be specific enough when compared to contemporaneous artists like James Coleman. On the other hand, scholars like Jean-Frangois Chevrier and Thierry de Duve have championed Wall's work as a highly specific and self-referential contribution to the post-conceptual avant-garde. Considering these arguments through a selection of Wall's pictures, this paper will also consider the artist's own address of the ontology of the photograph present within his extensive critical writings. Susan Laxton Princeton University What Photographs Don't Know The construction of historical memory has been a critical issue for photography since the medium's emergence as a method of mass reproduction and dissemination. German photographer Thomas Demand's work addresses the question of veracity that remains at the heart of the medium and its role in shaping history, through a two-stage process that transports its politically charged subjects from mass-produced photographic images to sculptural installations and then back again to a final life-scaled photographs. What is lost in this movement between mediums becomes the significant factor in Demand's work, as in his final images the artist doubly addresses the relation of photography to material reality: most obviously, in the illusion of natural space evoked by the images at first glance, but also more subtly, in the first stage of his process, where Demand attempts to reconstruct an historically grounded, fully dimensional "reality" based only on the information delivered by mass-media photographs. The resulting blasted clean tableaux raise questions about exactly how much information we can ever get from any photograph and make a powerful statement about the arbitrary construction of collective memory - and the indeterminate rather than authoritative nature of all photographic meaning. My talk proposes that Demand's distrust in photographic ontology is characteristic of contemporary photographic practices, and that this sweeping critique of the revolutionary potential of the medium as it was put forward by the avant-gardes of the early 20th century is a critique imaginable only after the rise of digital practices. Anne Marsh Monash University Politics and Poetics: A Case Study on Peter Kennedy In this paper I explore the way in which a multi-media installation art practice - which uses photography and video - can represent political crisis and conflict. The paper will address the conundrum of the post-medium condition described by Rosalind Krauss and draw on aspects of Walter Benjamin in relation to politics and memory. The paper uses the work of Peter Kennedy, one of Australia's most astute commentators on the political conflicts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as a case study to explore recent critical/theoretical ideas which question the value of inter-disciplinary art. The purpose is to demonstrate that multi­media art is a strong contestant in the field despite Rosalind Krauss' argument that installation threatens the medium. Peter Kennedy's practice incorporates photography, video, light-writing in neon and photo-media/sculptural installation. The works explore the big issues of our times: war, genocide, totalitarian regimes and massacres. Politics, philosophy, poetry and personal histories come together in the work. As an artist Kennedy draws on the political theories of the left but he is eclectic and poetic. Walter Benjamin's angel of history recurs in several photo-media works, but Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky are also present as ghosts. His monumental photo­video-sculptural installation Chorus from the Breath of Wings is a meditation on the end of the 20th century and the downfall of both totalitarian regimes and Utopian visions. Alexandra Moschovi University of Sunderland Changing Places: The Rebranding of Photography as Contemporary Art Long neglected as a second-rate art, photography as such was fully accommodated in the art museum in the late 1970s, a development that coincided, chronologically and ontologically, with the advent of postmodernism. This belated institutionalisation, triggered, no less, by the structural changes the museum itself was undergoing at the time, ushered in a reassessment of photography across the board. By the late 1980s, the modernist construct of (art) photography, singularly defined by the qualities unique to the medium itself, was overshadowed by an expanded lens-mediafield, now widely termed "the photographic". Moving from the medium-specific photograph to the indexical, still or nnoving, image, this novel category embraces, under the same conceptual umbrella, an array of media, genres, and practices-, from Robert Smithson's late 1960s photographic works, William Eggleston drugstore snaps and Allan Sekula politicised documentary, to Gregory Crewdson's trompe I'oeil tableaux, Sam Taylor Wood's video installations and Wolfgang Tillmann's heroin-chic magazine photographs. But is this fusion really a rupture in photography's ontcdogical premises that matches the morphological changes it has sustained in the process of its museumification? Or, is it simply the profile of institutionalised photography, an ingenious way for the "post-media" museum to make use of the photographic material amassed over the last few decades, that allows for such pluralism? This analysis will be pursued tnrough a cross-examination of contrasting definitions of photographic practices as contemporary art. Alexander Streitberger Universite Catholique de Louvain "The Ambiguous Multiple-Entendre". The Impact of Photography in Multimedia Works of Marcel Broodthaers and John Baldessari Since the late 1960's there has been an increasing interest in blurring the boundaries between photography and film. The issue of the paper is how the interaction between photography and film offers a new perspective on the perception of reality by superposing fixed and moved images? Concerning the perception of media-interaction processes two fundamental categories have to be considered: On the one hand there is the overlaying of images as a physical aspect of the work. So the film « Le corbeau et le renard »(1967) from Marcel Broodthaers superposes multiple layers of photographed and filmed images to incite an "exercise of reading". On the other hand the overlying of photography and film can take place in a mnemonic process of reconstruction or imagination. In his Blasted Allegories »(1978) John Baldessari creates a rebus-like tableau by combining television film stills with randomly chosen words. By taking the photographs from films broadcasted on television with the aim to create a new "film board" Baldessari stimulates the two basic mnemonic activities of reconstruction and imagination. Being a kind of "media rebus" the two works mentioned above consider the function and the meaning of photography as strictly context-bound. Nevertheless, in being a part of the "ambiguous multiple-entendre" of superposed real and/or mental images, photography plays a capital role in revealing the interdependence of image structures, perception and mnemonic processes. Mechtild Widrich MIT Can Photographs Make it So? Three Outbreaks of Valie Export's Genital Panic, 1969-2005 In November 2005, performance artist Marina Abramovic restaged legendary performances of the '60s and '70s, including Vito Acconci's Seed Bed (1972) and Valie Export's Genital Panic (1968). The work, ironically titled Seven Easy Pieces, was based on an imaginative reading of the mostly photographic documents. What is the role of these photographs, covertly sandwiched between two live performances, one historical, one contemporary? Are they neutral "documents" of live actions that took place some decades earlier? I will focus on one of these re-performances to show that the unacknowledged presence of these photographs forces us to reconsider assumptions about the live quality of performance, the opposition of authenticity and reproduction, and most importantly, the performative interaction between artist and audience. For Valie Export's Genital Panic, Abramovic posed holding a rifle, restaging Export's photographic work of that name rather than the associated performance per se - which had consisted of walking (sans rifle) through the rows of a cinema in pants with a cut-out pubic triangle. Does the photograph then constitute the performance? If the photograph offers the prospect of a more engaged, sympathetic public, can the photograph simply invent this public? Valie Export's phallic rifle, introduced into live performance by Abramovic, is crucial to the gender critique of the performance: in the photograph, it stands in for Export's absent male antagonists. Yet, we cannot simply neglect the live context of performance. Rather, employing the concept of the performative as derived from Austin's speech act theory, I will differentiate the distinct public gestures that are performed by Export and Abramovic in their respective contexts of reception, and reflect on the construction of myth and effective gesture. Martina Droth, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Session 5 Contesting Forms, Testing Functions: Encounters between Sculpture, Decoration and Design The category of 'decorative art' defies precise definition. As a term, it is descriptive rather than definitive, and implies a condition of art, instead of a distinct category of its own. It is often used interchangeably with 'applied art', 'industrial art' and 'design', even though each of these terms evokes a specific period and comes with its own unique associations. Inherently interdisciplinary, these practices cross fluidly into other, more easily-defined categories of art, such as painting, sculpture and architecture. Yet when they are studied, catalogued or displayed, objects classed as decoration or design often assume an autonomy that contradicts their interdisciplinary nature. This session seeks to explore these divisions and intersections with specific reference to sculpture: when does an object count as sculpture, decoration or design? In turn, how are these definitions absorbed and reflected into art history and histories of decorative art and design? The papers in this session address these and related questions from a number of perspectives, revealing their different implications that highlight shifts and continuities in the historic interdisciplinary partnership that exists between sculpture, decorative art and design. Emily Richardson University College London Miniature 'Grands Homines', or Paradoxical Porcelains This paper addresses D'Angiviller's decision to have Les Grands Hommes reproduced in miniature by the manufactory of Sevres, a decision made ostensibly in light of the success enjoyed by the life-sized marbles at the biannual Salons, and which might translate into valuable sales for the manufactory. It is likely his motivation also stemmed from a desire to see this most magnificent and ideologically resonant act of state patronage distributed as widely as possible, believing Sevres an appropriate vehicle. Yet I will question whether their miniaturisation significantly undermined the values central to the original Grands Hommes series, which was intended to 'reanimate patriotic sentiments' in the minds of all who beheld the exemplary French subjects represented. Their ambitious size, prominent placement in the Salon, and the explanatory notes that accompanied them, served to reinforce their political import. Without this anchorage, miniaturised and de­contextualised, could their porcelain counterparts carry the weight of meaning borne by the originals? Hollow, fragile, light, multiple, might they be more accurately described as anti-monumental? I will consider whether, relocated to private interiors, these 'statuettes' offered themselves to a different model of spectatorship, becoming objects of delectation, collection and decoration rather than emulation. D'Angiviller's plans also represented a misjudgement in relation to the market, for they did not sell in the quantities he expected. I will consider whether, although too 'decorative' to bear the ideological pretensions of the Grands Hommes, their reproductions were not decorative enough to correspond with contemporary taste for porcelain, nor to fit with conventions for its display. David Raizman, Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University, Pennsylvania Dinner with Dante: fine and Applied Art in nineteenth-century presentation furniture Designed as unique pieces almost exclusively for the universal exhibitions of the later 19th century, large highly-wrought cabinets attracted critical notice and public interest, competing for the coveted medals sponsored by exhibition organizers. The study of these imposing presentation pieces addresses the relationship between sculpture and the decorative arts during this period, while the iconography of such furniture explores literary allusions and offers a parallel to the interrelationship among the arts in theme-based interior ensembles of the 18th century. Equally intriguing is the continuity between presentation furniture and pre-industrial craft practices. Unique display pieces belong to the tradition of the chef d'oeuvre (masterpiece) through which craftsmen asserted independence and self-regulation of finished work and the means of production. Such autonomy faded in the 19th century amid the consolidation of capital, changes in labour practices, and the emergence of new markets and outlets for commercial distribution. These circumstances establish the economic and social context for nineteenth-century display furniture [Auslander, Furnishing Modem France (1996)]. My paper will incorporate several examples of presentation furniture, but its focus is an immense sideboard in the Ftiiladelphia Museum of Art, carved by Italian-American artist Giuseppe Ferrari (1844 - c. 1941) that includes a relief bust of Dante and motifs illustrating the Divine Comedy. The subject reveals Ferrari's preoccupation with a respected iconographic tradition, familiar to period audiences, for instance, through engraved illustrations by Gustave Dore. Investigating Ferrari's sideboard as an exemplar of a unique class of objects reveals the fluid and contested categories of art, decoration, and design in a period when conflicting attitudes and practices competed amid widespread changes in production, marketing, and consumption. Morna O'Neill Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Between Painting and Sculpture: Walter Crane's 'Europa' and the origins of decoration In the late Victorian period, the foundation of the Art Workers' Guild (1884) and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1888) established craftsmanship as the central tenet of artistic practice and in doing so raised questions about the problematic status of the fine arts of painting and sculpture in its philosophy. What is their role as craft? With his 1881 oil painting Europa, Walter Crane reconnected painting to its decorative origins through sculpture through the "primitive" and cultic origins of Tanagra figures and the tactile quality of gesso. Crane painted Europa at the very moment he began experimenting with gesso, which he described as "a midway point between painting and sculpture," for the dining room of 1 Holland Park, the London home of the lonides family. At the same time, he designed the decorative overmantel to display the lonides' Tanagra collection, whose "most beautiful" example was a figure of Europa recumbent on a bull. Inspired by the statuettes, Crane produced a maquette for his painting, the only known example of this practice in his work. Sculpture likewise determined the criticism of the painting, as numerous reviewers commented on its "relief-like" quality. With Europa, Crane challenged the politicized denigration of the fine arts by creating a political canvas that addresses sculpture in both form and content. Session 5 Viola Weigel Museum Bellerive/ICS Hochschule fur Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich Hermann Obrist's 'Parasitic' Sculptures as Challenge for the Museum's Institution and Modern Art History One of the main shifts in the partnership of the "decorative" and "fine arts" happened around 1900, when Art Nouveau artists tried to break down the frontiers between the arts. One of the co-founders of the German movement in Munich was Hermann Obrist (1862-1927). Obrist, originally of Swiss origin with Scottish roots, was an immense versatile artist and theorist, who worked in-between disciplines as in textiles, sculptures, drawings and a new type of "architectonic sculptures". A unique body of ten architectonic sculptures is part of the permanent collection of the Museum Bellerive, Museum of Decorative Arts in Zurich. It is interesting to observe, how the shift from the decorative arts to fine arts and back again is visibly expressed in the problem to integrate Obrist's oeuvre in the museum's displays: For two decades his objects were presented to the public as part of the fine arts collection at the Kunsthaus Zurich. When the objects returned to the Bellerive again, they remained stored. On the one hand, Obrist's work is handled as "parasite" and was never shown in a monographic exhibition in Switzerland. On the other hand, today, his work re-emerges as much demanded "link" between architecture and sculpture, sculpture and design. The paper will not only explore how the institutional background of the traditional museum failed to cope with the "hybrid" character of such a work of art, but also how Obrist openly addresses the interdisciplinary question in aesthetic terms as well. Contesting Forms, Testing Functions: Encounters between Sculpture, Decoration and Design Visa Immonen University of Turku, Finland 'Capricious Contours': The Scholarly Tradition and its Ways of Transforming Silver Artifacts into Objects of Art The study of sih/er artefacts has formed a rather unified tradition in Nordic scholarship since the 19th century, and has mainly concentrated on museum collections. While silver artefacts produced prior to ihe early medieval period have mainly been left to archaeologists, later periods have mainly been studied by art historians, ethnologists and historians. The production of silver artefacts has been recognised as the specialised domain of silversmiths, and the profession has therefore been treated as a unified phenomenon in the monumental biographical catalogues of silversmiths and their signatures, hallmarks. These early-20th-century compilations still constitute the backbone of silver studies. Silver scholarship has been built on three mutually-defining concepts: style history, the most influential aspect, production as artistic agency, and consumption in terms of functionality. Despite their importance, the concepts of style have rarely been defined, yet their effects can be traced in the history of research and in the ways in which silver artefacts are seen as material objects. This paper examines the ways in which the history of silver objects has been studied and presented, focusing on Finnish and Nordic perspectives. The concept of style brings silver artefacts under aesthetic evaluation and the objects thus enter into the realm of art. I will examine how scholars have created a tradition of silver objects as an integrated subject, despite the eclectic stylistic diversity of silver productions, especially in the 19th century, which contest the unity of a stylistic continuum. New Art titles from PUILIIHEII Contemporary British Women Artists Rebecca Fortnum Enlightening, absorbing and frequently very Jig!** funny, collected here are brand new interviews with twenty of the most important women artists practising internationally and based in Britain today. The interviews, with artists spanning different generations and working in media and modes as diverse as performance art, painting, sculpture, video and installation, give first-hand insights into both the artists' lives and the creative process. Here we find out how it feels to perform in front of an audience; about having to make money whilst trying to make art, and about the struggle to work in the face of loaded intellectual and political expectations - having to defend a love of 'bourgeois' modernism, for example, or an ambivalent relationship with feminism. All the while the artists' genuine excitement about materials and the making process, as much as issues or ideas, shines through, making this is a collection which will be particularly enjoyed by artists themselves. Fortnum speaks to: Jananne Al-Ani, Gillian Ayres, Claire Barclay, Christine Borland, Sonia Boyce, Maria Chevska, Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Anya Gallacio, Lucy Gunning, Jane Harris, Runa Islam, Vanessa Jackson, Emma Kay, Tanya Kovats, Maria Lalic, Hayley Newman, Paula Rego, Jemima Stehli and Tomoko Takahashi. Rebecca Fortnum is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts, London (Camberwell) and a Research Fellow at the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. She has written on contemporary art and is a practicing artist, exhibiting widely. 244 x 172mm . 176 pages . 978 1 84511 224 . £15.99 PB Art & Laughter Sheri Klein This is the first book to take seriously (though not too seriously) the surprisingly neglected role of humour in art. Art and Laughter looks back to comic masters such as Hogarth and Daumier and to Dada, Surrealism and Pop Art, asking what makes us laugh and why. It explores the use of comedy in art from satire and irony to pun, parody and black and bawdy humour. Encouraging laughter in the hallowed space of the gallery, Sheri Klein praises the contemporary artist as 'clown' - often overlooked in favour of the role of artist as 'serious' commentator - and takes us on a tour of the comic work of Red Grooms, Cary Leibowitz, 'The Hairy Who', Richard Prince, Bruce Nauman, Jeff Koons, William Wegman, Vik Muniz and many more. She seeks out those rare smiles in art - from the Mona Lisa onwards - and highlights too the pleasures of the cute, the camp and the downright kitsch. Sheri Klein is Professor of Art Education at The University of Wisconsin-Stout. A practising artist, she is also an avid collector of humorous art. 210 x 148mm . 168 pages . 978 1 84511 234 9 . £39.50 HB 210 x 148mm . 168 pages . 978 1 84511 235 6 . £14.99 PB Three new titles in the popular Art &... series Art & Obscenity Kerstin Mey Explicit material is more widely available in the internet age than ever before, yet the concept of'obscenity' remains as difficult to pin down as it is to approach without bias: rt & notions of what is 'obscene' shift with ob societies' shifting mores, and our responses to explicit or disturbing material can be highly subjective. In this intelligent and sensitive book, Kerstin Mey grapples with the work of twentieth-century artists practising at the edges of acceptability, from Hans Bellmer through to Nobuyoshi Araki, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Sprinkle, and from Hermann Nitsch to Paul McCarthy. Mey refuses sweeping statements and 'knee-jerk' responses, arguing with dexterity that some works, regardless of their 'high art' context, remain deeply problematic, whilst others are both groundbreaking and liberating. Kerstin Mey is Chair in Fine Art and Research Leader on the 'Interface' project (Research in Art Technologies and Design) at the University of Ulster. 210 x 148mm . 168 pages . 978 1 84511 234 9 . £39.50 HB 210 x 148mm . 168 pages . 978 1 84511 235 6 . £14.99 PB Art & War Laura Brandon This is a truly encyclopedic survey of artists' responses - both 'official' and personal - to 'the horrors of war'. Art and War reveals the sheer diversity of artists' portrayals of this most devastating aspect of the human condition - from the 'heroic' paintings of Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent to brutal and iconic works by artists from Goya to Picasso, and the equally oppositional work of Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and others who reacted with fury to the Vietnam War. Laura Brandon pays particular attention to work produced in response to World War I and World War II, as well as to more recent art and memorial work by artists as diverse as Barbara Kruger, Alfredo Jar and Maya Lin. She looks finally to the reactions of contemporary artists such as Langlands and Bell to the US invasion in 2001 of Afghanistan and the 'War on Terror'. Laura Brandon is Curator of War Art for the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. She is the author of Art or Memorial?: The Forgotten History of Canada's War Art. 210 x 148mm . 168 pages . 978 1 84511 236 3 . £39.50 HB 210 x 148mm . 168 pages . 978 1 84511 237 0 . £14.99 PB I'B.TAURIS Publishers T o order these and other titles from I.B.Tauris, To subscribe to our free New Book please contact our distributors: Alerts Service go to Tel : + 4 4 <°) 1 2 6 4 342932 www.ibtauris.com Fax : + 4 4 (°) 1 2 6 4 3427 * 1 Email: tps.ibtauris@thomson.com Vanessa Corby, Faculty of Arts, York St John UniversityElsa Chen, Department of French and Francophone Studies, UCLA Session 6 Makers and Making: Between Trauma and Representation In the context of a post-conflict Northern Ireland this session turns its attention to the means by which particular social and psychic traumas can be creatively negotiated and transformed via artistic production to challenge and expand the territories of cultural memory. In 'The project for Scientific Psychology,' (1895) Sigmund Freud theorises trauma as constituted by the relationship between two events. Rather than a simple store and response, however, its dynamic is dependant upon a period of latency', revival and revision. Though trauma may be worked through in artistic production its significance, as that which exceeds everyday experience, may not be realised until a receiving context has been established. Performed within creative practice hitherto unthought knowledge may thus become caught between art production and cultural memory. The socio-political territories of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have produced multiple sites of oppression. Differences of class, ethnicity, gender, politics, religion and sexuality thus form the focus of this session. Hitherto occluded by the receiving contexts and cultures that have assigned socially acceptable meaning to practices on the basis of nonrecognition this session examines the means by which highly charged 'Othered' experience returns from the limits of representation. Critical analyses from artists, scholars and curators situate specific examples of creative production and the discourses that produce meaning for them. Particular focus has been given to questions of conflict, belonging and not belonging, longing and displacement, mourning and loss. The panels grouped under Makers and Making will thus examine and produce the means by which experiences hitherto denied adequate representation and/or critical reception may be made visible. Doris Rohr Interface, University of Ulster Communication or Communion: Commemorating the Dead When Jay Winter refers to memorials as "sites of symbolic exchange" (Winter 1996), he critiques over-determined singular readings of memorials as mere ideological re-constructions. Winter invites us to review memorials as multi-coded in function and narratives. The conflictual urban and political landscapes of bereavement one encounters in Belfast also refute a clear separation of individual commemorative memorial and political monument. The symbolic re-presentation of the dead person through name (inscription), objects left as presents or gifts to the dead, and acts of touching, mediate and overcome separation and loss, fulfilling the paradoxical role of substitution ritual and means of reality testing. Absence and presence are indeed symbolically exchanged. Phenomenology accounts for touch as integral part of the sensory mediation of a person's environment, in which "every perception is a communication or a communion (....) a coition (...) of our body with things" (Merleau-Ponty 1962). Rappaport asserts that the distinction between ritual acts and objects is not always clear-cut: both ceremonial act and material substance form a whole (Rappaport 1999). Metaphorically lifting Winnicott's term transitional object to the situation of adult bereavement, this paper attempts to analyse motivation and relationship of enduring phenomena of graveyard and memorial culture, to more recent phenomena of "spontaneous shrines" (Santino 2006), in particular those devoted to the new saints and heroes of popular imagination. Collective and publicly expressed rituals intersect with those of private emotion and projective identification and desires. Anthony McCann University of Ulster Crafting Gentleness: The Political Possibilities of Gentleness in Everyday Life Much of my work has involved identifying the architectures of thinking and doing that implicate us in the dynamics of personal, political, and social "enclosure", that is, dynamics that draw us towards the accelerative gravities of coercion, violence, domination, oppression, anger, and fear. These dynamics, I suggest, are driven by the dominance of expectations that uncertainty can be or should be eliminated. In seeking the elimination of uncertainty we can do violence to the possibilities of representation, violence to the possibilities of relationship, and violence to the possibilities of healing transformation. Nevertheless, the elimination of uncertainty remains a dominant theme and a normative aspiration across the orthodoxies of many, if not most disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, limiting our understandings of the possibilities of politics, shaping the boundaries of cultural memory, and undermining the possibilities of empowerment. In this paper, various schools of thought related to "craft", and "crafting" are used as epistemological doorways to more gentle, helpful, and appropriate understandings of the role of affect, power, trauma, violence, and transformative participative agency in the social interactions of our lives in Northern Ireland. Attempts in feminisms and elsewhere to declare that "the personal is the political" are allied to an exploration of key paradoxes of political and personal engagement. It is possible to work with understandings of power that eschew the elimination of uncertainty and celebrate the richness of affectual experience, leaving theoretical and practical breathing space for our negotiations of trauma and welcome respect for the powerful gentleness of healing transformation. Pat Hardy, Courtauld Institute The Parting Cheer: Drawing Out Emotions in Images of Victorian Emigration This paper will examine the artistic response to the extensive emigration from Britain which took place in the mid-Victorian period, focusing specifically on a major genre scene painted by Henry Nelson O'Neil, The Parting Cheer, 1861 .This painting portrays an emigrant ship departing for an overseas colony in a panoramic scene containing numerous figures, the majority of which convey grief and despair at the departure. The representation of trauma in The Parting Cheer (and its effect on the formulation of the visual memory of emigration) is assessed in this paper by drawing upon contemporary responses to the painting and by reference to nineteenth-century debates relating to emigration to the colonies at that time, including emigrants' own accounts of their feelings about the experience of emigration. Such responses are compared not only to paintings on emigration produced in the 1860s but also to another work by O'Neil called Eastward Ho ! August 1857, 1858, on the departure of soldiers to the Indian Mutiny. By positioning The Parting Cheer within an interpretatrve framework relating to the presentation of identities of gender, class and ethnicity in scenes of emigration, it appears that its display of emotional intensity diverged from the approach of other mid-century narratK/es of emigration. Many paintings representing emigration scenes appeared to subordinate a display of naturalistic scenes of emotion to a controlled response to the experience This subordination has its roots, I argue, in an ideology which favoured colonial emigration and opens out wider cultural meanings than traditional narratives of mid-Victorian scenes of emigration have presented. _44 Session 6 Jennifer Way University of North Texas Irelantis and Traumas of Prosperity This paper considers how Sean Hillen's collage series Irelantis, 1994-1998, enlists mid twentieth-century history as a salvo for trauma associated with the Republic of Ireland's status as the Celtic Tiger during the late twentieth century. To be sure, one might not readily associate trauma with prosperity. Yet, for some in the Republic, the rapid achievement of economic prosperity caused correspondingly acute anxieties involving realities and further prospects for globalism, manifested as economic integration with the European Union, increases in consumerism and immigration to Ireland, and the need to affirm a national ethnic and cultural identity. The paper will consider to what purposes Hillen's art has been featured on the covers and pages of books exploring these themes; however, it will emphasize how his Irelantis charges popular imagery with re-presenting late century globalism as mid-century internationalism. Interestingly, mid-century Irish art and visual culture has been deemed uninteresting and even lagging. However, for Hillen's project, postcard imagery from the period provides the crucial foundation for managing contemporary apprehensions about the nation and its social and cultural sense of self. From the imagery Hillen elicits latent narratives and treats them to look historically determining. Also relevant is that latent refers to the time it takes for data to move across a network connection. Hillen uses mid-century postcard imagery in combination with certain compositional techniques to transport the present to the past, where it appears recognizable and thus explicable. Throughout the series, as land registers shock - horizons have been torn away, and continuities and expanses thwarted, sometimes replaced by the absurd, various techniques and content choices, soothe. Additionally, Irelantis summons a mythology so remote as to anchor the conflation of contemporary stress with appeasing mid-century evocations in an ostensibly unproblematic, historical vanishing point. Makers and Making: Between Trauma and Representation Jules Dorey Richmond & David Richmond York St John University How will we Remember When All the Witnesses Are Gone? What did our Fathers do during the war? How an artistic endeavour can lead to a beginning of an understanding of 'cultural trauma'. How a creative process could be conflated with the travelling concept of the shift of trauma from the individual psychology to a cultural, 'a civic space'. How the shift in understanding of representation, places the psychology from an individual interpretation to the composition of these broken fragments that constantly haunt the artist engaged in post modern memory work. Using the case study of our art practice especially the theatre of witness series funded by Scottish Arts Council and the CCA, Glasgow in the late nineties. Where in making work to understand the cultural 'acting out' encountered in 1995 VE day celebrations, we made work about our fathers journey in world war 2 through 3 other works to burnt offering and the gates of Auschwitz. We thought the work was about us, it was. .. .Through the lens of the Shoah. We created these somatic temporal monuments; it was all we had to offer. Our performances though based on the question "how will we remember?" never giving answers, a series of attempts, is this how we will remember? Is this how we will remember? (Ad infinitum litany) doomed to failure, language, representation, logos, comprehension. An open field composition that allows the audience ­witness to reflect. It is not the holocaust monuments as such that we turn for remembrance, but to ourselves within the reflective space they both occupy and open up. In effect, there can be no self-critical onuments, but only critical viewers. Janes E Young. Texture of Memory - writing and rewriting of me Holocaust. P189. Ondana Uniuersrty Press 1988) Mark Edwards University College London The Re-Emergence of Conflict - Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis' 'The Battle of Orgreave.' The Miners' Strike was a controversial and divisive moment in recent British history, but one that has been largely occluded from historical memory, in part due to the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997, which appeared to have healed the divisions of the Thatcher era. This paper will consider Jeremy Deller's recovery of this moment through the re-staging of episodes from the Orgreave picket. He did so through two popular forms for historical remembrance, the battle re-enactment and the television reconstruction in which the past is recalled through the stories and words of contemporary witnesses. The paper will foreground the similarities and differences between these forms and their usage in this work. They tend to construct a consensual picture of the past, whereas, I will argue, Deller's event and Mike Figgis' film of it re-opened the social and psychic trauma caused by the strike whilst refusing any resolution: a refusal that challenges the New Labour consensus. As the original participants re-live the past either in the re-enactment or in filmed interviews, it becomes apparent that their sense of anger and loss remain very much alive. I will argue that this re-visiting of recent history is of value both to the nation and to the participants: firstly, as a moment in which those whose memories have been repressed in the collective history are able to express them; secondly, that in the actual re-enactment participants are able to find again a sense of belonging. Alice Correia University of Sussex Black and British? The Art of Donald Rodney Although given in 1968, Enoch Powell's notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech continues to resonate in contemporary society, and his vision of an English street overrun with migrants has had an enduring impact on the ability of Britain's diaspora to feel at home in their home. This paper will examine the work of Donald Rodney and his attempt to illustrate the lived experiences of Britain's black youth in the 1980s. I will argue that Rodney's work from this period significantly contributes to discussions surrounding British identity and the conflict of belonging to a nation that is discriminatory. Making a close analysis of his visual motifs, I will discuss how Rodney interrogated unequal power relations, remembered conflicts, and attempted to find justice through visual representation. Rodney's juxtaposition of images of slavery with more recent events such as the Windrush migration and the Brixton and Handsworth riots, captures the discrimination and frustration felt by large sections of the black community, reiterating that the memory and legacy of Britain's imperial project has yet to be fully understood. Paul Ricoeur has suggested that "most events to do with the founding of any community are acts and events of violence. So we could say that collective identity is rooted in founding events which are violent events". I will argue that Rodney's photographic and multi-media installations illustrate how black minority identity has been shaped by the experience and memory of not only physical, but also what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called "epistemic violence". I will conclude by comparing Rodney's work with that of Chns Ofili's in order to consider how a younger generation of black artists are approaching the representation of black people and the problem belonging to a national community. Svea Josephy Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town Truth, Lies and Videotape: Imaging Trauma, Memory, Truth and Reconciliation This paper will focus on the ways in which the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), trauma, truth, memory and reconciliation were imaged in the media and in South African art during the period of the Commission's brief and its immediate aftermath (1995-2003). The visual artifacts surveyed - from press and documentary pictures which record the TRC, to more intuitive art works which deal with the slippery nature of truth and memory - form a continuum. Al of the artifacts grapple with questions of how to image reconciliation, truth and memory and how to image the past in the present. I will examine documentary and press images of the TRC before going on to compare the ways in which the TRC and the truths and memories it revealed were interpreted in specific works by individual photographers and visual artists, including Gillian Edelstein, William Kentridge, Sue Williamson and Jo Ractliffe. The TRC provided South Africa with oral testimonies and written statements that allowed for a new history to be heard and written. This in turn has acted as a catalyst for a re-imaging (and re-imagining) of South African history. In contrast to media representations, the work of artists has evinced a more complex, three-dimensional understanding of what it means to remember, to forgive and to reconcile. Artists such as Williamson, Ractliffe and Kentridge have pursued a more layered, nuanced approach to the ideas of truth' and memory than would have been possible within apartheid's obsessive ideological binarism. Their uneasy, critical, and subtle imaging of trauma, truth, memory and reconciliation are in contrast to cruder representations of the same notions in the popular media. Christine Conley University of Ottawa Rebecca Belmore: Screening the Traumatized Body Since her debut in the late 1980s as a High-tech Tipi Trauma Mama, Canadian and Anishinabe artist Rebecca Belmore has engaged with the power of performance art to assert the subjectivity and identity of native people in Canada. In a practice marked by the phenomenology of her own considerable corporeal involvement, Belmore acts out the pain of the traumatized body to give voice to the losses of First Nations people since European contact and to reveal what Michael Taussig calls "public secrets," defined as "that which is generally known, but cannot be articulated": the shameful treatment of native people by law enforcement officers, the indifference of authorities to the disappearances of Native women in the sex trade, the cultural genocide of the residential schools, among others. Belmore's turn to video projections in two key performance based pieces, Vigil (2002) and Fountain (2005) introduces a different sensory relation to her exploration of embodied memory and knowledge. In this paper I consider the implications of this shift with reference to Peggy Phelan's notion of performance as "representation without reproduction" and hence as a model for an economy in which "the reproduction of the Other as the Same is not assured." Of particular interest in thinking through these issues of visibility and power is Belmore's treatment of the screen as a palpable surface: a wall of lightbulbs in Vigil and a waterfall in the Venice Biennale installation of Fountain, the latter introducing real, ambient sound in addition to the video soundtrack. THE HUMAN ANIMAL IN WESTERN ART AND SCIENCE MARTIN KEMP Forthcoming THE HUMAN ANIMAL IN WESTERN ART AND SCIENCE Martin Kemp 320 P., 187 HALFTONES CLOTH £22.50 ECHO OBJECTS The Cognitive Work of Images Barbara Maria Stafford 302 P., 14 COLOR PLATES, 92 HALFTONES CLOTH £27.00 ISOLARION A Different Oxford journey James Attlee 256 P., 1 MAP CLOTH £12.00 PERMISSIONS, A SURVIVAL GUIDE Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property Susan M. Bielstein 188 P., 35 HALFTONES, 1 LINE DRAWING, 1 TABLE PAPER £9.50 BEAUTIFUL SUFFERING Photography and the Traffic in Pain Edited by Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne Copublished with Williams College Museum of Art 216 P., 74 COLOR PLATES, 16 FI6URES PAPER £16.00 THE POLITICS OF URBAN BEAUTY New York and Its Art Commission Michele H. 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Vol. 41 begins spring 2007. jjEL THE UNIVERSITY SJjjW OF CHICAGO PRESS JOURNALS DIVISION www.joumals.uchicago.edu Shane McCausland, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Session 7 Painting Workshops of the (17th Century) World: Grounds for Contestation With globalisation has come the fledgling field of world art. Yet, the effects, if any, of this development on inter-cultural and comparative research in art history remain uncertain. Uncoupling modernity from 'the west' enabled any culture to have its own modernity, and the autonomy to determine it, in theory. In practice, it has often meant that colonised cultures, by necessity, continued to be investigated in relation to the historical powers, while Euro-American cultures could continue to be investigated per se. What impact do power relations in geopolitics have on our ability, or otherwise, to engage in comparative and cross-cultural scholarship in art history? Are other, local factors more significant, such as the lack of broadly established empirical foundations for many of the cultures in question? This panel is as an object- and practice-based approach to such questions. Speakers aim to demonstrate a series of cultural paradigms and styles seen in the painting practices of artists' workshops across 17th-century Asia, and to contest them. What happens, for instance, when we juxtapose the practices of fairly closely related artistic traditions, such as those of the Kano School in Japan and a late Ming Chinese professional. What happens when we juxtapose these with a contemporary practice in Safavid Iran. These papers are presented by individuals working on specific artistic workshops of this period, who are minded to identify productive models of comparison in light of cultural differences. Moya Carey Independent, London Snowbound At Home: Mu'in Musawir in 17th-century Safavid Isfahan In Iran, the centralised workshop system (kitabkhana) was a strong feature of 15th and 16thC court manuscript-production. In the late 16th and 17thC, fashion moved increasingly towards single-page drawings and paintings, suitable for accumulation in muraqqa albums, and appropriately mobile for the wider market, as well as the Shah and his Isfahan household. Such production no longer required an extensive and expensive kitabkhana team. The new vogue made no such demands on resources, but aside from its relative economy and consequently broader patronage-base, it indicates a connoisseurial focus on the unadorned work of the draughtsman, a preference for figural style over narrative context, and a new isolation of the painter's identity, as quantifiable and therefore collectable matter. The genre swiftly developed as a virtuoso opportunity, and developed throughout the 17thC with increasingly self- conscious and mannered results. For artists themselves, this growing emancipation from the collective project of the royal kitabkhana was not always comfortable, not least in terms of financial security. The annotated drawings of Mu'in Musawir are seemingly for his own benefit. One includes the well-known Lion Attacking a Youth (dated February 1672), recording a shocking event at the Safavid court when a diplomatic gift had got out of control. From Mu'in's note, we learn that Isfahan was unseasonably cold that month, and he was obliged to remain at home. A smaller drawing of a resting lion was made a few days later, and shows that the snowbound Mu'in continued to reflect upon the attack as he waited for the weather to improve. Shane McCausland Chester Beatty Library, Dublin The Painting workshop of a late Ming Chinese eccentric: Chen Hongshou (1598-1652) This paper is intended as a study of the workshop practice of the eccentric late Ming scholar-painter Chen Hongshou (1598-1652), a consummate figural artist celebrated for his ironic painting style. Chen Hongshou's activities in and about Hangzhou of the mid 1630s will be explored through visual analysis of several large-scale hanging scroll paintings of 1635-8, as well as related paintings and woodblock prints. In traditional historiography these hanging scrolls have been regarded as single-handed masterworks; this paper will explore how they are in fact studio works by Chen Hongshou and his assistants. The study of these works will investigate, for instance, how erased but still visible under-drawing appears to indicate the work of an executive hand -Chen Hongshou's. Other areas such as flat enclosures of repeated foliage motifs, often incorporating basic visual errors, indicate the work of far less competent hands - Chen Hongshou's 'students' (menren) or 'disciples', including Yan Zhan. In exploring the techniques of multiple production evident in Chen Hongshou's studio style, the aim is to throw new light on Chen and his assistants' use of popular woodcut-print technology and imagery in the making of 'high art'. The larger aims are to gain a richer understanding of how and why Chen Hongshou employed the technology of mass culture in an apparently ironic commentary on urban society and mores of his mid-seventeenth-century world; and to understand how the increasing 'professionalisation' of painting in China may relate to parallel developments in contemporary painting practices beyond China. Matthew P. McKelway Gakushuin University, Tokyo Representations of the Song of Everlasting Sorrow in Early Modern Japan: Painters of the Kano School Of the many classics of Chinese literature revered in Japan, Bai Juyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Ch: Chang hen ge; J: Chogonka) was one work that had particular resonance. The Song's story of the ill-fated romance between an emperor and his concubine appealed to the aesthetics of pathos and fleeting beauty that inform much of Japanese writing of the Heian period (794-1185), when it is mentioned in such classics as the Tale of Genji and Sarashina Diary. As was the case with indigenous narratives, visual representations of the Chogonka must have complemented its many retellings; the earliest painted examples to survive, however, date to the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century. The Kano ateliers of painters in Edo and Kyoto played a pivotal role in the visual canonization of Chogonka among the repertoire of painted subjects in early modern Japan. Having mastered techniques and themes associated with both Chinese and native painting styles and themes in the sixteenth century, the Kano ateliers in Edo dominated painting production for the elite over the next three centuries. Along with such didactic subjects as Paragons of Filial Piety and Mirrors of Exemplary Emperors, Chogonka offered an appropriate painting theme for the elite, perhaps for the implicit political lessons it conveyed. Kano-school depictions of Chogonka appear most often on gilded folding screens, a format ideal for creating a particular ambience or sense of splendor. Depictions of the Chogonka and other Chinese classics by the Kyoto Kano-school painter Kano Sansetsu (1590-1651) demonstrate that the Kano painting workshops were by no means a singular, unified enterprise, and that painting subjects could serve as stages for contestation and competition between the main branches of the Kano house. This paper will examine extant works and early Edo-period painting theory to argue that Sansetsu's representations of the Chinese classics were predicated on an impulse to depict these themes with a greater degree of accuracy than was available in works by the orthodox Edo­based Kano ateliers. Shane McCausland, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Session 7 Painting Workshops of the (17th Century) World: Grounds for Contestation With globalisation has come the fledgling field of world art. Yet, the effects, if any, of this development on inter-cultural and comparative research in art history remain uncertain. Uncoupling modernity from 'the west' enabled any culture to have its own modernity, and the autonomy to determine it, in theory. In practice, it has often meant that colonised cultures, by necessity, continued to be investigated in relation to the historical powers, while Euro-American cultures could continue to be investigated per se. What impact do power relations in geopolitics have on our ability, or otherwise, to engage in comparative and cross-cultural scholarship in art history? Are other, local factors more significant, such as the lack of broadly established empirical foundations for many of the cultures in question? This panel is as an object- and practice-based approach to such questions. Speakers aim to demonstrate a series of cultural paradigms and styles seen in the painting practices of artists' workshops across 17th-century Asia, and to contest them. What happens, for instance, when we juxtapose the practices of fairly closely related artistic traditions, such as those of the Kano School in Japan and a late Ming Chinese professional. What happens when we juxtapose these with a contemporary practice in Safavid Iran. These papers are presented by individuals working on specific artistic workshops of this period, who are minded to identify productive models of comparison in light of cultural differences. Moya Carey Independent, London Snowbound At Home: Mu'in Musawir in 17th-century Safavid Isfahan In Iran, the centralised workshop system (kitabkhana) was a strong feature of 15th and 16thC court manuscript-production. In the late 16th and 17thC, fashion moved increasingly towards single-page drawings and paintings, suitable for accumulation in muraqqa albums, and appropriately mobile for the wider market, as well as the Shah and his Isfahan household. Such production no longer required an extensive and expensive kitabkhana team. The new vogue made no such demands on resources, but aside from its relative economy and consequently broader patronage-base, it indicates a connoisseurial focus on the unadorned work of the draughtsman, a preference for figural style over narrative context, and a new isolation of the painter's identity, as quantifiable and therefore collectable matter. The genre swiftly developed as a virtuoso opportunity, and developed throughout the 17thC with increasingly self- conscious and mannered results. For artists themselves, this growing emancipation from the collective project of the royal kitabkhana was not always comfortable, not least in terms of financial security. The annotated drawings of Mu'in Musawir are seemingly for his own benefit. One includes the well-known Lion Attacking a Youth (dated February 1672), recording a shocking event at the Safavid court when a diplomatic gift had got out of control. From Mu'in's note, we learn that Isfahan was unseasonably cold that month, and he was obliged to remain at home. A smaller drawing of a resting lion was made a few days later, and shows that the snowbound Mu'in continued to reflect upon the attack as he waited for the weather to improve. Shane McCausland Chester Beatty Library, Dublin The Painting workshop of a late Ming Chinese eccentric: Chen Hongshou (1598-1652) This paper is intended as a study of the workshop practice of the eccentric late Ming scholar-painter Chen Hongshou (1598-1652), a consummate figural artist celebrated for his ironic painting style. Chen Hongshou's activities in and about Hangzhou of the mid 1630s will be explored through visual analysis of several large-scale hanging scroll paintings of 1635-8, as well as related paintings and woodblock prints, in traditional historiography these hanging scrolls have been regarded as single-handed masterworks; this paper will explore how they are in fact studio works by Chen Hongshou and his assistants. The study of these works will investigate, for instance, how erased but still visible under-drawing appears to indicate the work of an executive hand -Chen Hongshou's. Other areas such as flat enclosures of repeated foliage motifs, often incorporating basic visual errors, indicate the work of far less competent hands - Chen Hongshou's 'students' (menren) or 'disciples', including Yan Zhan. In exploring the techniques of multiple production evident in Chen Hongshou's studio style, the aim is to throw new light on Chen and his assistants' use of popular woodcut-print technology and imagery in the making of 'high art'. The larger aims are to gain a richer understanding of how and why Chen Hongshou employed the technology of mass culture in an apparently ironic commentary on urban society and mores of his mid-seventeenth-century world; and to understand how the increasing 'professionalisation' of painting in China may relate to parallel developments in contemporary painting practices beyond China. Matthew P. McKelway GakushOin University, Tokyo Representations of the Song of Everlasting Sorrow in Early Modern Japan: Painters of the Kano School Of the many classics of Chinese literature revered in Japan, Bai Juyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Clr. Chang hen ge; J: Chogonka) was one work that had particular resonance. The Song's story of the ill-fated romance between an emperor and his concubine appealed to the aesthetics of pathos and fleeting beauty that inform much of Japanese writing of the Heian period (794-1185), when it is mentioned in such classics as the Tale of Genji and Sarashina Diary. As was the case with indigenous narratives, visual representations of the Chogonka must have complemented its many retellings; the earliest painted examples to survive, however, date to the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century. The Kano ateliers of painters in Edo and Kyoto played a pivotal role in the visual canonization of Chogonka among the repertoire of painted subjects in early modern Japan. Having mastered techniques and themes associated with both Chinese and native painting styles and themes in the sixteenth century, the Kano ateliers in Edo dominated painting production for the elite over the next three centuries. Along with such didactic subjects as Paragons of Filial Piety and Mirrors of Exemplary Emperors, Chogonka offered an appropriate painting theme for the elite, perhaps for the implicit political lessons it conveyed. Kano-school depictions of Chogonka appear most often on gilded folding screens, a format ideal for creating a particular ambience or sense of splendor. Depictions of the Chogonka and other Chinese classics by the Kyoto Kano-school painter Kano Sansetsu (1590-1651) demonstrate that the Kano painting workshops were by no means a singular, unified enterprise, and that painting subjects could serve as stages for contestation and competition between the main branches of the Kano house. This paper will examine extant works and early Edo-period painting theory to argue that Sansetsu's representations of the Chinese classics were predicated on an impulse to depict these themes with a greater degree of accuracy than was available in works by the orthodox Edo­based Kano ateliers. Camilla Smith, University of Birmingham Shearer West, University of Birmingham Session 8 Questioning Authority: Commercialisation and the Academic Ideal in Eighteenth-Century European Art This session focuses on the 'contestation' of high art in the face of the monolithic hierarchies established by academic art institutions in 18th­ century Europe. Central to the ideas of this session is the notion of academic expectation and how artists working outside of this context engage with or seek to challenge this. A wide variety of papers on topics such as dramatic rhetoric, gender, identity, 'unorthodox' subject matter, colonial aesthetics and commerce, will examine artistic ventures and private commissions which put artistic establishments under continual strain to modify their conditions to accommodate a wider range of themes and objects as the public's attitudes and tastes changed. This session seeks to address, what impact a growing culture of consumption, international political instability and cosmopolitanism had on the art academy and the ways in which the academy tried to incorporate some of these ideas into its theory, training and exhibition spaces. Kui-ying Huang University Of Essex The Importance of Being 'General': Sir Joshua Reynolds's Commercial Endorsement of Painting as a Liberal Art In the Discourses on Art, Sir Joshua Reynolds posits 'the general idea of nature' as the presiding principle in taste and art, an idea which he regards as the predominant quality to be acquired and displayed by artists. It has been well-stated by scholars that Reynolds's aestheticism as such is closely intertwined with the intellectual discourse in the 18th century, which attempted to establish painting as one of the liberal arts. Nevertheless, as a successful painter Reynolds was acutely aware of the marketability of painting in contemporary society; his proposition of 'the general' (or generality) requires to be considered in a broader context. I intend to start by dissecting the concept of 'the general' as presented in The Discourses on two levels. Firstly, 'general' as a theoretical term is to be understood as one's (painter's and viewer's alike) ability to abstract the intrinsic quality of things from the particular. I will argue that such a definition of 'the general' is addressed to a prestigious, well-educated audience who also constituted the main target group of potential patrons. Secondly, 'general' will be viewed as an eclectic painting style. Instead of an indexical and peculiar style, Reynolds proposed that artists should adopt a classical, timeless, universal approach. Here the 'general' as a taste corresponds to the carefree, gentlemanly manner highly valued by polite society. By discussing how Reynolds's aestheticism as such is connected to humanist rhetoric and the taste of an exclusive class, I will argue that he had successfully assured painting's status as a liberal art. At the same time the 'cultural capital' of painting as constructed is cleverly used to meet the pursuit of the members of the upper-class, who were the ideal viewers, and most importantly, the potential buyers. Alan Boulton University of Birmingham Fuseli and the Rhetoric of the Sublime. The aim of this paper is to examine Henry Fuseli's use of rhetorical constructs in the production of his work c.1775-85. Via a close reading of both Fuseli's writings on the artistic process and his artwork the paper will propos that Fuseli's approach to creative practice was an effective re-presentation of the classical rhetorical model of communication. Additionally, such a use of rhetoric, finds its parallel in the use of similar tropes in the Longinian tradition of the sublime, known to Fuseli and expanded on in the second half of the eighteenth-century through the theories of Young and Burke. The paper will forward that the combination of the traditions of rhetoric and the sublime come together in Fuseli's conception of the artistic act finding alignment in representations of the male body. This body, created via associative selection, will be shown to serve as an archive of heightened visual effects, a canon of sublime rhetoric the rhetorical-sublime. It will be considered that the body thus conceived served Fuseli as a performative trope, a substitutional form equally demonstrative of Fuseli's conception of valid art and his own genius. In conclusion the paper will highlight how Fuseli's particular approach to 'being an artist' was purposefully at odds with contemporary English academic visual conventions. Herein particular attention will be given to Fuseli's consideration of an epic mode of representation as a suitable means for suggesting elevated sensate experience, the use of the body as a persuasive discourse, an impassioned manifesto of artistic presence. Sophie Bostock Warwick University Canaletto: The Right Sort of Artist? On the 26th January 1755 the first Venetian Academy was established under the presidency of Giambattista Tiepolo and thirty-five other maestri. Strikingly, one of the most famous Venetian painters of the eighteenth century. Giovanni Antonio Canal was not included among the thirty-six founder members. In fact, ft seems that despite continued attempts to enter this institution, Canaletto was not admitted to the Academy until September 1763. Only then, under Pittoni's presidency was he elected by ten votes to four. Given that selection to this institution was weighted in favour of figure-painters could ft be that Canaletto was simply not the 'right sort' of artist? On another occasion, according to the Academy's records, Canaletto and a sculptor abstained from voting for a proposition that works of old masters could only be judged by figure painters. In this paper I will discuss the tension between local Academic ideals and the art market in eighteenth-century Venice by focussing on the Venetian Academy from its inception in 1755 until its reform following Napoleon's invasion of the Venetian Republic. Being the 'right sort' of artist and pleasing the 'right sort' of patron was patently important in mid-eighteenth century Venice. And yet, according to Frances Haskell, large-scale history paintings were comparatively less expensive than the small works of 'fashionable' artists such as Canaletto, thus highlighting a conflict between market forces and the institutional reception of art in Venice at this time. Eliana Martinis Reader in Art History University of Essex The Late Portraits of Nicolas Koutouzis (1790-1812): a Hymn for or a libel against the Zakynthian bourgeoisie? After the conquest of Crete and the wars between Venice and the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 17th century, the strategic significance of the Ionian Islands increased. On a cultural level, development was a matter of aesthetic choices from the side of the locals, who went further than painting religious icons in a mixed style. Zakynthos and Corfu never replaced Herakleion, or gave birth to a new El Greco; however, they played a capital role in the Hellenic progress towards non-folk secular art. Since the lonians were a colony of Western countries, it is interesting to see that their artists adopted an ambiguous attitude towards the values of the ruling class. The gradual transition of titles and social influence to a local nouveau-riche elite is evident in the Zakynthian portraiture of the late 18the century. This paper focuses on Nicolas Koutouzis (1741 - 1841), a significant agent for the flowering of Zakynthian portraiture. The bourgeois portraits by Koutouzis are influenced by the emblematic pomposity of the Italian baroque. The pose, the garments and the professional accessories apparently celebrate the sitter's affluence and social place. Nonetheless, they also offer a latent critique against commercialism, avarice and cultural pretenses. The attitudinal innovations of Koutouzis are seen in comparison to the portraits of his student Nicolas Kantounis (1767 -1834), who offers penetrating psychological studies of a much milder character. Furthermore, this paper discusses some eclectic affinities with Goya, on the basis of Koutouzis's trips to Italy and alleged internship at the studio of G. Tiepolo. Session 8 Phillippa Plock University of Warwick Art Becomes Artisan: The case of selling Antoine Dieu. In 1698, only two years after he had won the Prix de Rome, Antoine Dieu produced a lavish trade card to advertise his newly established painting business on the Petit Pont, Paris. Whilst there is scant evidence of the reaction of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture to this enterprise, it is significant that Dieu did not become an Academician until 1722, four years after he sold his business. Rather than a simple manifestation of institutional snobbery, Dieu's exclusion from the Academy may well have been precipitated by the semiotic fusion of high art and trade that is evident on his trade card. Importantly, Dieu utilised motifs from his trade card in his engravings and paintings. For Dieu, the card demonstrated his ability for scholarly invention, the very quality the Academy used to distinguish painting from manual craft. Dieu destabilised this segregation to form his own language of intellectual commerce. This paper arises from a project cataloguing a collection of French seventeenth and eighteenth-century trade cards that have been little studied. As a result of this work, Dieu's card, considered thus far only in relation to Watteau's much more famous L'Enseigne de Gersaint, can be situated within a much broader visual language of Parisian shopkeepers, from toolmakers to embroiderers to mapmakers. Dieu's card provides an important case study to consider the emerging discord between the Academy's attempts to police forms of representation and the increasing visuality of eighteenth-century Parisian commerce. Questioning Authority: Commercialisation and the Academic Ideal in Eighteenth-Century European Art Catherine Horwood Royal Holloway University of London Blooming Artists: Female Botanical Illustrators and the Battle for Recognition. In spite of its requisite skills, botanical illustration has traditionally been seen as a poor relation to the work of 'fine' artists and as a consequence undervalued by mainstream academic institutions. This has been compounded by the fact that since the eighteenth century, botanical illustration has been popular with women and thus further denigrated as a merely a 'drawing room' accomplishment in common with needlework. In contrast to the flamboyant tradition of flower painting pioneered by seventeenth-century Dutch masters, the depiction of plants was transformed in 1735 by the publication of Systema Naturae by Carl von Linnaeus into a form of illustration that required a disciplined precision few artists were able to achieve. Those who could were soon in demand by publishers to illustrate the many commercial horticultural and botanical manuals that began to appear in the late eighteenth century. However, few women were able to achieve public recognition in spite of great skill shown in this field. This paper will examine the struggle of female botanical artists to achieve recognition in an area that was already looked down upon by the art establishment as commercial and not a recognised art form worthy of serious academic consideration. It will examine the contest between the academic and the commercial worlds at a time when self-publication was often the only option f a advancement. It will show that even commercial success often did not reveal the identity of these invisible artists since any form of public recognition for women was strongly resisted. Valerie Mainz University of Leeds The Chevalier d'Eon and His Several Identities This paper will address the particular case study of the cross-dressing French diplomat, the Chevalier Charles d'Eon de Beaumont (1728-1810) who lived as a woman in London for the last 25 years of his life. Alongside his unprecedented gender transformation, recent work on the Chevalier d'Eon has focussed in on the time he spent in Russia and England in the period 1756-1777 when he was active as an important political figure, writer and secret agent. Using some of this material, the study will examine caricatures and prints of the Chevalier d'Eon, produced in London during the 1770s at the height of this figure's public notoriety. Such visual images use devices of word and image and test out traditional definitions of high art and genre categories. In depicting the Chevalier d'Eon as a woman who had had an earlier career as a French dragoon, the extent to which these representations forge a sense of British identity through definitions of the French other will be discussed. The contribution will also test out Droh Wahrmann's contention in The Making of the Modem Self: Identity and Culture in eighteenth-century England, Yale University Press, 2004, that the case of the Chevalier d'Eon can serve to mark out a shift in the environment and historical epistemology of the period from a socially turned 'pre-self' to the rise of more fixed, modem notions of identity. Issues of migration and of the crossing of boundaries will be covered in this examination of someone who travelled on behalf of his own country to other nations to work as a diplomat, soldier and spy, who underwent a gender transformation, who became a migrant to London during the turbulent years of the French Revolution and who. eventually and to earn his keep, participated in fencing tournaments, dressed as a woman. Prasannajit de Silva University of Sussex Home from home? Early depictions of British Hill Stations in India The British hill stations in India are a pervasive element of nostalgia for, and perhaps the ultimate archetype of, the Victorian Raj. However, their establishment dated back to the 1820s. In this paper, I consider early representations of the Nilgiri Hills in southern India, and, in particular, images taken from books compiled by East India Company army officers and published in London in the 1830s. This was a time when the status and identity of British colonists in India were still in a state of uncertainty, and were being negotiated through various aspects of visual culture. Although the plates can be located within the wide range of British landscape depictions of India, I argue that they follow less in the usual picturesque tradition than in a topographical or cartographic one with eighteenth-century roots in the works of Sandby and others (but with possible parallels in other colonial settings). This in itself has implications for the idea of claims to territory, and might be linked to notions of colonial mastery and control. However, such readings are of only limited value in this instance. These images, with their distinctive visual approach, are suggestive of a narrative of settlement quite different from those encountered in other colonial representations of India. Yet, while the images play a part in the assertion of Britishness in the hills, they also, in the end, belie such claims. The superficiality of the imposition of Britishness becomes apparent, and hence its fragility is clear. Sue Rasmussen University of Birmingham George Moriand: an academic artist? The recent 2006 exhibition at the National Gallery Rebels and Martyrs revisited our current notions that eighteenth-century artists, as exemplified by Reynolds, were striving to increase the status of their profession by assuming scholarly attributes and behaviours. There was keen competition among prominent artists for entry into Royal Academy circles and the favours of patrons. History painting was officially held in the highest regard by the artistic establishment. Studios became fashionable places for the bon ton to visit. The persona that George Moriand projected, was cultivated by his biographers, and has been accepted by scholars, was the epitome of the anti-Academic figure. He did not so much challenge academic conventions as ignore social and artistic conventions, and apparently never attempted grand themes. E K Waterhouse says of Moriand that in the process of becoming well-known for his sentimental and rustic scenes he was 'one of the first to avoid direct patronage and commission and to paint purely at his own sweet will'. Moriand refused both a handsome offer of an apprenticeship from Romney, and, later, the opportunity to 'paint a room full of pictures' for the Prince of Wales; he preferred to keep 'low' company and to employ servants to sell his pictures. His studio was the haunt of boxers, jockeys, and other visitors so boisterous that he had to install a bar across the room to separate them from him and his easel. This paper will discuss some tensions that my research is revealing between this conventional view of Moriand as an artist who strove for independence from any form of personal or professional control, and his actual practices. As a commercial artist Moriand did not, and perhaps could not, ignore the gravitational pull of the Academy entirely. The Royal Academy went on showing Morland's work, even in his last years when his abilities were in severe decline; what does ft say about our ideas of the hegemony of the Academy and its precepts that it could continue to embrace such a contrary artist? Caroline Palmer Oxford Brookes University Behold me now a female connoisseur': women writers on art, 1770 to 1830 According to Barrell, women in eighteenth-century England were largely excluded from the 'Republic of Taste'. Tied to the particular, the material and the personal, they were considered incapable of making reasoned, theoretically informed aesthetic judgments. Periodical writers such as Pasquin and Pindar satirize the female viewer of art mercilessly as inattentive and ignorant, obsessed with fashion and gaudy colour, their assessment of paintings distorted by vanity and acquisitive instincts. Towards the end of the century, however, women were beginning to challenge their construction as consumers of art, rather than as disinterested observers; they expressed educated opinions on the works they viewed in exhibitions and on tours abroad, not only in private letters and journals, but also, increasingly, in print. Stimulated by an ever more commercialized art world that actively encouraged their participation, as well as by a growing market for their writings, women began to contest their theoretical exclusion from the predominantly male bastion of connoisseurship - first in the context of travel accounts, and later through scholarly translations, monographs and periodical articles. In studying the published works of some early women writers on art, such as Anna Miller, Mariana Starke, Lady Morgan and Anna Jameson, I will consider the extent to which they resisted traditional academic discourses on art. Did they stress the value of the innocent, untrained eye, and the special qualities women might bring to viewing? Or did they reinforce the dominant classical model, playing down their gender in order to bolster their authority to speak on matters of art? Deborah Sugg Ryan, Loughborough University Timo de Rijk, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands Session 9 Immaterial Culture? Things, Artefacts and Meanings In 1977 the Design History Society was formed as a separate entity to the Association of Art Historians. Its thirtieth anniversary offers a timely opportunity to review the boundary between design history and art history in both methodology and subject matter. In particular, what do current preoccupations of what might be called the 'new design history' have to offer art historians? Much early design history was concerned with the 'designed' and mass produced object. However, since the translation of Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (1984) and Daniel Miller's Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1986), design historians have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which material culture mediates and forms personal identities. The impetus for this paradigm shift came from feminist, political and post-modern scholars who challenged both the modernist canon of design artefacts and the methodologies of modernist design history to explore the non-designed and the amateur. Design historians have borrowed from social anthropology and ethnography to investigate the aesthetics of everyday life, especially mass consumption practices. Judy Attfield more recently raised the possibility of 'things with attitude' in Wild Things (2000). Furthermore, new possibilities are opened up by the historian of science Bruno Latour who has suggested in Reassembling the Social (2005) that 'objects too have agency'. Yet despite its prominence in design history, the material remains largely immaterial for art historians. This session investigates the meanings of things represented in artefacts. It considers artefacts produced by artists and designers as material things rather than simply conveyors of visual images. It asks how does the materiality of artefacts contribute to their meanings? What effect does the life of artefacts - as things - have on their meaning? And how are artefacts used to construct individual and group identities? It includes contributions from practitioners who are dealing with these issues in their work. The session is dedicated to the memory of Judy Attfield (d. 2006) who was a key player in the establishment of the 'new design history'. Jan Konings Freelance Designer, Netherlands 'YOU: You are designers and I am your co-creator' The annual Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2006 is 'You'. 'You' is everybody who made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. 'You' is also everybody who blogged about politics, camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software. 'You' is anyone using or creating content on the World Wide Web. According to the magazine, community and collaboration have arisen on a scale never seen before. For example, in the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. 'You' is person of the year for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game. The role of the consumer has also changed outside of the world wide web. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy. The user has become a part of the product chain and has complete participation in the creation process. The formerly passive consumer has changed to become a co­creator. This new role of the user has large influence on the role of the designer. Is it conceivable that the designer should also change position and assume the role of co­creator? And what is then the difference with the user? And how should we write about the 6 billion co-creators? Gareth Williams Victoria & Albert Museum, UK Paradigms and Archetypes: Contemporary Dutch Designers This paper examines work by a number of contemporary Dutch designers who place an evocation of historical archetypes and precedents centrally in their practice. These include Jurgen Bey, Hella Jongerius, Piet Hein Eek, Maarten Baas, Studio Job and Jeroen Verhoeven. In different ways they each pursue visions of modernity that embrace and reconnect with history. In so doing they seek to bridge the fracture caused by modernism. Work by these designers answers Judy Attfield's description of 'things with attitude': design-heavy, highly visible and charged objects that stand out against the sea of 'everyday things' that are made and used. These are seldom objects for mass-production and mass-consumption but exist as independent commentaries on the general world of goods. A common mechanism employed by all the designers is to exploit the emotional resonance of an historic precedent or archetype while simultaneously questioning its validity by making it strange. They call on assumptions of commonly-held shared values to give their objects meaning. Employing archetypes attempts to short-circuit the system of 'things with attitude' because they stand outside and beyond the specific ownership of a particular designer. They contribute to what the designer Richard Hutten describes as 'no sign of design', a closed archetypal visual language that seeks to disguise the individuated signature style of a designer. While much of the work is undoubtedly innovative and sometimes provocative, this paper concludes by asking whether it may also be prone to be reactionary and is rapidly descending into formalistic dogmatism. Catherine Harper University College for the Creative Arts, Epsom, UK Double Dresses: A Narrative of a Dress in a Civil Partnership The Partnership Act 2004 (UK) pemntted same-sex 'marriages', and in September 2006 my partner and I enacted our 'special day'. With two 'brides', the 'wedding dressfes)' became material sites of self-identification and mediated contestation. My partner, at the last moment, refused her shop-bought frock for a 1940s cocktail dress owned by her mother. My role became that of the seamstress, charged with making good a dress falling apart at the seams. These acts of repair took place before and during the celebrations, and the dress took on a key significance in marking, documenting, investigating and explaining the significance and meaning of the day. Using material cultural concepts and ideologies variously mobilised via Burman's The Culture of Sewing (1999), my maternal grandmother's whitework embroidery, and Gober's Untitled (Bridal Photo) (1996), this paper examines how sewing - previously used in my family to enact the discipline, frugality and virtue of Northern Irish Presbyterianism - was used here to (re)construct (queer) femininity. The dress, already invested with the perceived decadence of 1940s London, tempered with the respectability of my partner's mother's successful role as wife and mother, is relocated on a lesbian body, thereby reconfiguring its constructed meanings of the feminine. Yet, by being configured as a bridal gown, this garment re-entered the feminine normative, only to quick skip away as the 'groom' gets revealed as a 'second bride'. The tendency of the dress to fall apart throughout the 'marriage' day, and to require repeated mending, set up a dynamic of fixity and slippage, with sewing being the act of temporary anchorage in a field of uncertainty. The tight, white stitching, taught by my puritanical grandmother (a keen homophobe within her generation and context), was re-activated in the subversive construction of a 'lesbian bride'. But, and to continue to trouble the normative, just as most grooms work hard to eagerly unlace the body, this female 'groom' laboured to sew up the gaps where flesh threatened to emerge... _62 Session 9 Janice Helland Queen's University, Kingston, Canada Anatomy of a Dress: Embroidery, Display and Meaning, 1886-1907 This paper will examine the life or biography of three lavishly embroidered dresses commissioned by Ishbel, Countess of Aberdeen (1847-1939) between 1886 and 1888 in order to 1) disrupt the modernist anti-modernist debate that threatens to establish a hierarchy within craft history, and 2) demonstrate the relationships between gender and identity, culture and nation as displayed in these costumes. The objects are not extant and exist now only as sketches in nineteenth-century woman's magazines and photographs of Ishbel Aberdeen in her role as vice queen of Ireland (1886 and 1906-15) and governor-general's wife (Canada 1893-98)). However, an examination of the metamorphoses of the embroidered panels (which includes their production and consumption) expands discussions of meaning in embroidery, particularly when craft interacts with the body. Katie Brandon University of Manchester, UK Spinning Yarns: Women and Artists' Books in the Home This paper will investigate artists' books produced by women, an area of artistic production that does require a consideration of the material form of the art object. I will demonstrate how many bookworks by women reference artefacts traditionally associated with women's role within the family, and how they use both the meanings associated with these items and the status of the book-as-object to create a radically different relationship with the viewer, questioning accepted interpretations of both artefacts and artworks. Immaterial Culture? Things, Artefacts and Meanings I will examine the connection between the construction of family histories, the process of needlework and knitting and other household chores traditionally gendered female, and their relationship to the home, all of which is crystallised in the form of the artist's book. Works examined will include Annette Messager's fifty-six Album Collections (1971 -73), scrapbooks full of the ephemera of the home - wedding photographs, sewn items, newspaper cuttings and knitting instructions; Claire van Vliet's binding for Aunt Sallie's Lament (1988) which mimics a patchwork quilt; Joan Lyon's use of the family album format in My Mother's Book (1993); and Jackie Batey's Anxious Homes (2000) which provides an ironic "how to" guide to cursory cleaning of the home for the anxious housewife. As everyday objects themselves, these books also question the status of high art. They occupy a contested space between literature, art and material culture, aspiring to the condition of either the mass produced object or the "low art" homespun item. In contrast to the traditional, gallery-based, unique art object, they are designed to be bought and read in a more relaxed environment, and are priced accordingly. The meanings of the books are again modified when they take up residence on the bookshelf in the home, and this life after the studio is integral to the way in which they function as both art objects and artefacts. Ed Krcma University College London, UK Liquidity: Beuys, Drawing and 'Material Imagination' Joseph Beuys remains one of the most controversial artists of the post-war period. The critical debate around his work remains largely polarized, with commentators taking up opposing positions in relation to the artist's mythologized persona and Utopian rhetoric. Few attempts have been made to engage with the material specificity of his work unharnessed from his authorial prescriptions. This paper seeks to offer redress to this situation by focusing on Beuys's output from the late 1940s and 1950s. I will explore the role of materiality and, specifically, liquidity, in these contingent, unspectacular works, seeking to retrieve some renewed potential from Beuys's heightened and sustained engagement with the material world. While avoiding recourse to the artist's esoteric and metaphorical explanations, I will also seek to move beyond an insistence on an obdurate, unrecuperable materiality. Instead, I will employ a broadly phenomenological approach to explore the intermingling of affective, perceptual and imaginative registers in this focused and inventive drawing practice. This line of enquiry will draw Beuys into dialogue with an unfamiliar constellation of artists and writers such as Marcel Broodthaers, Henri Michaux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Joyce. Through a close engagement with a small number of drawings, I hope to re-frame Beuys's potential legacy away from the recourse to esoteric codes and symbolic systems, and towards a more low-key and everyday exploration of materiality. Donna Roberts University of Essex, UK Frantisek Skala: Materiality and Memory in Post-Revolutionary Czech Art My proposed paper will discuss the work of the contemporary Czech artist, Frantisek Skala. Since his emergence in the late 1980s with the revolutionary group of Prague artists, the 'Hardheads,' Skala's work has been characterised by a skilful manipulation of found objects and an imaginative exploitation of the latent energies within worn materials. His exceptional craftsmanship is aided by a keenness for morphological resemblance to produce works that appear to defy distinctions between the natural and the cultural. Skala's success in the Czech Republic is partly due to his playful evocation of a nostalgic national identity in works that recall the mythology of the Bohemian forest and the hand-hewn objects of a pre-industrial culture. I wish to explore here, firstly, how the materiality of the works is crucial to a discussion of meaning, and secondly how Skala's oeuvre can be seen to represent an important stage in the post-communist Czech Republic, looking at how the materiality of his objects mobilises a network of correspondences which draw upon the previous life of materials, thereby imbuing the objects with a character of anteriority, of the artefact, or personal souvenir. While this has earned Skala's work an intimate place within a country eager to regain something of its past, it could be argued that the character of anteriority which animates Skala's work, and which is so embodied within the materiality of his objects, is currently being abjected by a younger generation seeking an international profile for Czech art through conceptual and digital developments. Grace McQuilten University of Melbourne, Australia Living in a Material World: Adam Kalkin's Suburban House Kit, Deitch Projects, New York, 2004 In 2004, contemporary artist Adam Kalkin confronted the issue of the artefact as material object by invading the space of Deitch Projects, a gallery located in one of the contemporary art hubs of New York with an exhibition titled Suburban House Kit, which was part art installation, part curated exhibition and part design store. Configured as an ironic design show-room, the exhibition presented a "suburban environment," every aspect of which was offered for sale. Art was a blatant commodity, including elusive conceptual performances such as a "DNA induced dinner" prepared by the artist and available via mail order. Suburban House Kit appeared to work within the logic of mass consumerism, feeding its expansion and enveloping the individual and aberrant objects of contemporary art, the modular and repetitious forms of mass-produced architectural design, and the space of the gallery alike. The glaring facade was that of a project well and truly implicated in the relativism of postrnodemity, where authorial and artistic privilege are not only questioned, but actively on sale. This paper examines whether the project represented the total commodification of contemporary artefacts, or whether an internal "dysfunction" in the material objects of Suburban House Kit served to undermine this commercial premise, presenting a complex critique of the relationship between contemporary art and consumerism. Damian Sutton Glasgow School of Art, UK Form Follows Fiction ­Designing Fred and Ginger This paper presents some of the findings of an AHRC-funded study of social interaction in cinema, and its importance to filmmaking as an industry of design. Using an approach led by Actor-Network Theory on the example of RKO in the 1930s, I will trace the influence of design theories and public taste, as manifest in the design of sets, costume and body in the Astaire/Rogers musical series. This paper investigates the actual effect that public taste and knowledge of popular design styles, such as 'streamlining' and 'form follows function', had on creative decisions made by RKO in the 1930s. Fred and Ginger movies are commonly assumed to be the epitome of escapist Modern society fantasy. Yet design in cinema means more than just beautiful sets that reflect elite style. My research uses RKO in-house journals from the 1930s, such as RKO RADIO FLASH, as well as trade press and fan magazines, to provide evidence of the 'traces' that studio responses to 'real world' design began to leave in film and studio production. In following these traces the paper asks: If meaning is translated onto objects in design, then what does the social interaction of studio personnel extract from the real world objects to translate on the ephemeral, intangible objects onscreen? The paper seeks to understand the design process as more than an appreciation of designed objects that leads to reiterative practice, and instead investigates how the processes of translation themselves are active in the creation of new ideas and concepts in design. Damon Taylor Buckingham Chilterns University The Amazing Reappearing Art Object [performance] Since the art object 'dematerialized' in the late sixties and early seventies art entered a period in which the idea or the art piece's relationship to other works of art often became more important than the materiality of the objects created. Minimalism required that the physicality of art should speak of absence and simplicity while conceptualism emphasized the theoretical concerns of art over any material considerations. In such a world the art object therefore primarily existed as a bearer of meaning. Where the art object was considered in its own right it was considered as 'art' before it was seen as another element in the broader system of objects. Since the 1990's the object has rematerialized in art in a big way. Yet now the object is likely to be metanymic, in that it stands for itself. Martin Creed's lights going on and off are just that. Tracey Emin's bed is actually a bed. Simon Starling's 'Shed Boat Shed' fulfils its nomenclature. This performance suggests that this is because we have entered a period of heightened commodity fetishism in which objects themselves appear to have come to be invested with agency - they are therefore presented by artists almost as though they were IMng things. The performance piece explores what happens when we inhabit a world where the human qualities of change and growth come to be ascribed to objects while people are seen to live in what Benjamin described as the Hell of the constant consumerist 'Now Time'. Richard J Williams, School of Art, Culture and Environment, University of Edinburgh . Guillaume Evrard, School of Art, University of Edinburgh Session 10 Representing the Monster City: Art History and Pathologies of Urban Development 1800—2007 The city has always been an important art historical subject, but generally understood as a collection of finished monuments, or as an end point of rational processes of beautification. Of course a few places escape this view: the scruffy and heterogeneous outskirts of nineteenth-century Paris, for example, are now firmly part of the canon, thanks to T. J. Clark. But art historians tend to be drawn to cities at the end of their development, not the unruly monsters they are at the beginning. Art history's tacit assumptions about cities might be worth revisiting for the following reasons: (1) human settlement has become for the first time in its history become predominantly urban, rather than rural; (2) cities themselves are now objects of an unprecedented scale, with megalopolises of 20 or even 30 million (Chongqing, Tokyo, Mexico Mumbai, Sao Paolo) increasingly common; (3) the geography of these cities makes a nonsense of conventional assumptions about centre and periphery; (4) they have quite unprecedented concentrations of poverty, as well as new extremes of wealth. The changing condition of cities has been extensively discussed in recent years by such diverse figures as Mike Davis, Sharon Zukin, Anthony King, David Harvey and Peter Hall, all of whom relate the monstrous urbanization now seen in the third world to the explosive growth of cities in Europe and North America 150 years ago._ But how might a discipline like art history engage with the idea of the city in such changed conditions? What might the analysis of art or visual representation contribute to the understanding of the city? What might art history contribute to such analyses over and above those of urban geographers or sociologists? What ethical basis might such analyses have? Papers selected for this session look at both historical (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and contemporary topics. The imagined city in each case is, however, a monster: excessive, unplanned, and mostly out of control. It is this monstrous pathology, the fears and desires it might engender, and its relation to art history that are our subjects. Stephen Kite Newcastle University Watchful Wandering - Ruskin's Synechdocal Representation of Venice On hisfirst visit to Venice alone in 1845, Ruskin was hit by the full force of the monstrous excesses of the industrialised city of modernity: the Veneto-Austrian ammiglioramenti (improvements) included the new railway bridge - destroying the isolated lagoon setting of the city; gas lamps along the Grand Canal; cast iron balustrades on the bridges; and invasive 'restoration' of the monuments. Yet his research campaign for The Stones of Venice - begun in the winter of 1849 - was based in the Hotel Danieli - itself representative of the new phase of leisured tourism which created the audience for Ruskin's books and a related literature of travel and journeyings. At the end of the first volume of The Stones of Venice Ruskin attacks the readers' London of 'grim railings and dark casements' and then guides them towards an equally dystopian Venice whose railway arches leading to 'a straggling line of low and confused brick buildings' might now be confused with 'the suburbs of an English manufacturing town.' Through close readings of Ruskin's hitherto little-explored notebooks and diaries related to The Stones of Venice - and the stones themselves - the paper explores Ruskin's modes of interpretation in confronting and representing the changed condition of the city in modernity, focusing on his stratagem of straying or 'watchful wandering' - specifically his unexamined journeyings within as well as to the city - and his connected synechdocal vision wherein the fragment emblematises the whole. Kitty Hauser University of Sydney Scars, Sores and Rashes: Britain and the Beast This paper will explore the pathological imagery of urban growth in Britain between the wars, in preservationist books like England and the Octopus (1928) and Britain and the Beast (1937), and how this imagery is to be found in visual art of the period. Metaphors of a 'rash' were applied both to urban development as it encroached on rural areas, and also to the findings of the new technique of aerial archaeology, which revealed prehistoric burial mounds, ditches and settlements outlined in growing crops, visible only from above. This paper will examine the co-incidence on the same plane, and the visibility in the same images, of these two kinds of rash, and how ­pictorially, technologically, and politically - their contradictions were represented and resolved. Celina Kress Centre for Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin Growing Berlin - How Tenement Buildings Devoured a Villa Colony Berlin grew during the second half of the nineteenth century with tremendous ferocity. Within four decades the population had quadrupled, reaching almost 4 million by the First World War. However, construction in the city took place on a relatively small surface area, resulting in a process of extreme consolidation. There was no unifying overall concept, nor were there any planning restrictions in place to subdue the spatial implosion. At the end of the 1920s Werner Hegemann coined the censorious phrase "stone Berlin" for the nightmarish Stadt der Mietskaseme, or tenement city, that had been created. But at the same time Jean Giraudoux, visiting from Paris, wrote enthusiastically: "One big garden from Lichterfelde to Halensee - quelle victoire." The extremely contradictory impressions of space experienced in Berlin during the first half of the twentieth century ­the awareness of a "bipolar" city according to Julius Posener - were behind the fierce battle that took place in the last third of the nineteenth century: Berlin compactly arranged into adjacent five-storey multi-flat buildings versus Berlin as one extensive colony of villas in leafy gardens. Today isolated classical villas in the districts of Kreuzberg and Schbneberg are testimonies to a lost struggle. This paper will illuminate the course of events, the outcomes and the parties involved in the debate surrounding the dominance of an approach to urban planning that still defines the physiognomy of Berlin today. Issues and goals will be discussed, as well as the strategies and methods of negotiation. Paul Gladston The University of Nottingham The Unbearable Blandness of Being: Artistic Representations of the 'Monster City' in Contemporary China In recent years China has engaged in a centrally planned programme of industrialization and urbanization of unprecedented ambition and scale. As a result, many large towns and cities ­most notably those clustered around the Yangtze and Peart deltas and the Bohai region - have now been transformed into monstrous architectural palimpsests where re-workings of the Utopian visions of the likes of Antonio Sant'Elia, le Corbusier and Ludwig Hilbersheimer - more often than not sieved through the post-modernizing grid of Robert Venturis Las Vegas - collide with a pre-existing urban sprawl that has in many cases been reduced through deliberate neglect and demolition to a state of near ruination. As one might expect, many of China's visual artists have sought to engage with this new and spectacular urban vision as well as the troubling social, cultural and economic displacements which have accompanied it. What is also notable, however, is that many of these artistic engagements often seem to fall short of an incisive critical response to the brutal realities of everyday life in contemporary urban China. While this paper will acknowledge the role played by political repression in this ostensible shortfall, it will also draw upon extensive interviews with Chinese artists and curators and a reading of Song Tao and B6's recent installation Yard to argue that also at stake here is an increasingly axispicuous conjunction between appropriated 'Western' avant-garde modes of artistic production and an invocation of traditional forms of Chinese aesthetic affect with their own subtle, though telling critical potential. _68 Session 10 Representing the Monster City: Art History and Pathologies of Urban Development 1800—2007 Cynthia Hammond Concordia University Renegade Ornament: Urban Contestation and the Museum City 'Love locks' began to appear on an iron fence in Pecs, Hungary during and after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, linking a route between architectural monuments in the newly revitalizing city. Against the backdrop of the city's inclusion in UNESCO's World Heritage 'list' (2002), lovers clamped hundreds of padlocks to this fence, as tokens of affection and commitment. After several years of this practice, the fence was unrecognizable. Despite a vigorous civic campaign to deter the 'vandalism', participants covered and recovered the fence with such enthusiasm that authorities eventually surrendered to the practice. As renegade ornament, the locks occupy a tenuous spatial and discursive location between garbage and embellishment, criminal mischief and critical commentary. The insistent practice of locking - but not closing off - the fence interrupts Pecs' reconstitution of its urban space as a 'European Capital of Culture' (so designated in 2006, for 2010). This paper explores how such apparently small actions, when performed collectively, highlight anxieties over civic disorder, and dispute the inclusiveness of idealized urban images, or 'museum cities' (A. Orbasli 2000). I will use C. Ingraham's discussion of architecture and property (2006) to show how 'points of intensity' (E. Weizman 2006), such as the padlocked fence, reveal one of many battles within the contemporary city: the fight for its definitive representation, or interpretation. The heritage city, through its embattlement with oppositionality, exposes its hegemonic, and thus rich and contradictory struggle with its perceived other: the monstrous, unruly and disobedient city. Jennifer A. Greenhill Yale University Playing Beneath the Surface: William Holbrook Beard's Inferiority Complex In 1869, William Holbrook Beard had big plans. The controversial painter of animals behaving badly would parlay his skill at rendering animal life and his taste for the absurd into a mammoth sculptural project carved into the earth beneath New York's Central Park. His underground tunnel complex - populated by colossal, cackling beasts - would serve as a passageway between the park and the art museums that New Yorkers planned to build in Manhattan Square: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural history. But Beard's scheme never made it past the planning phase. Why is this so? The artist's plan never earned popular support because it brought the dark, conflicted, and excessive energies of civic planning to light, formulating an aesthetic out of the unmanageable and the monstrous to pave a way down into the repressed substrata of urban development. If wealthy, civic-minded individuals hoped to enlighten and educate the masses by constructing institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, thereby lifting American society up to a new level of maturity and cultivation, Beard's underground funhouse is a burlesque - a send-up or spoof - of these grandiose aims. Buried in his critique is an acknowledgement that his own art sits (in this case literally) beneath that culture giving rise to artistic advancement. For Beard was consistently the butt of critics' jokes and knew that his work would never fully achieve membership in these soon-to-be constructed hallowed museum spaces. A monumental form of wallowing, Beard's scheme demonstrates, then, both the place of humour in fine art discourse at this time and the dark side of urban 'progress.' Adam Brown University College for the Creative Arts, Maidstone You Show Me Mine and I'll Show You Yours: Views of Beijing and London under construction. If critiques of photography have established an ethics of the representation of the human subject, it has not so rigorously explored that of the representation of space. This is in spite of the deployment of spatial images in various contexts to combine and recombine places of social interaction as coherent form rather than spaces of multiplicity, ambiguity and paradox. Examining disparities between Western European representations of Beijing, and those of East London, both in preparation for the Olympic Games, reveals tensions between the construction of spectacle, and the representation of spectacular construction. In both locations, sublime and modern tropes occur within construction and its representations in such a way as to elide the complexity of the social in an overwhelming visual spectacle. Images of the 'monstrous' reconstruction of Beijing distributed in popular and highbrow media in Western Europe gloss over not only the Western origin of many of the architects involved, but more crucially the origins of architectural styles and construction techniques in a Western industrial tradition which has always had a problematic relationship to its representations. Development, invoked as a visible sign of economic growth, appears monstrous when located further East. Paradoxes exist which pivot on the fact that such sites are constructed for the purpose of being represented. Monstrosity is intentionally deployed in the interplay of representation and reception: such interplay functions as a network, in Latour's terms, meaning that neither building nor image can be considered in isolation. Do such networks assist in the construction of a notion of development itself? My methodology will be to explore the paradoxical relationship between the constructed spectacle and its representation, by examining the reception of each: how the constructed spectacle is represented in the photographic image, and how such images are distributed and received in different media contexts, including that of the Western art economy. Steven Gartside Manchester Metropolitan University Pathologies of the Positive: Surface and Appearance For any city to be characterised with the prefix 'monster' indicates some kind of disfigurement. This may have occurred as part of a slow process of change, or though more urgent development needs. Much material, image and text, is produced to introduce new architectural projects - often presented as projected images of the future arrived earty. The interest of this particular paper is not so much in the monstrous, but more in these early signs of dis-ease, the pathologies of the positive. Most forms of change, particularly in the central core of the city, involve persuasion. There will be a focus in the paper on the strategies of seduction, the methods by which the new is made desirable. For Jean Baudrillard, 'surface and appearance' are marked as being the space of seduction. In the potentially monstrous city, real and imagined architectural surfaces become caught up in what could be seen as the relentless pursuit and idealisation of the bland. Barnaby Haran University College London Taming the Tentacles of Skyscrapers in American Photography: Alfred Stieglitz and Ralph Steiner's Sublime and Ridiculous Monsters In these photographs, the skyscrapers, streets, and billboards of New York have a strong anthropomorphic quality, which makes the city appear by turns threatening and comical. In Stieglitz's photographs of the 1900s and 1910s the skyscraper is presented as a sublime, threatening giant, towering eerily above antlike people below. In Steiner's photographs of the 1920s, buildings resemble giant insects, or comical monsters distorted into dynamic patterns. I consider these images in relation to an ongoing debate on the exponential, unchecked rise of the skyscrapers, drawing from literary as well as architectural sources. Stieglitz returned to the skyscraper exactly as the increasingly politicized Steiner was abandoning such imagery, and concentrating of experimental film-making. The anthropomorphic qualities seem diminshed and the skyscraper city now appears measured and elegant, stately in a static and ordered metropolis. The ordered city is under slow steady construction. The vantage point is always from aloft, and the photographs seemingly mask the divisions of the Depression. I compare the photographs to poems by Brecht which talks of ruined cities and vacant skyscrapers, and photographs by Walker Evans that take ruination and damage as a subject. I discuss these ordered skyscrapers as analogies of the rational modernism promulgated by Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson at MoMA, and the establishment of the International Style of architecture as a corrective force, a matrix of modernity which was applied to empty modernism of both its political potency and bestial disorder. Jonathan Ham's, Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts (CAVA), University of Liverpool Session 11 Globalisation and Art since 1945: Disciplinary Renewal or Transformation? This session seeks to assess the effects of globalisation upon culture, art, and art history in the period since 1945, and to consider the likely forms of disciplinary reconfiguration within the institutions that teach or in other ways promote art and art history (including, beyond the universities, museums, galleries, government cultural funding agencies of many kinds, and other private and/or public arts-related organizations). This reconfiguration might also be represented as a contest or standoff - poignant or stagnant, depending on one's opinion - between art history in its current or received forms and formations, and the now quasi- or neo-fields of study (Visual culture', 'visual studies', etc.) that once promised, or threatened, to replace or outmode it. Papers in the session will examine this question from a variety of perspectives, making use of different kinds of empirical materials. Some deal with visual-cultural or artistic phenomenon marked or created under globalised conditions - e.g. artworks, artists, and organisations - while others review broader historical and theoretical problems, including the continued efficacy of inherited art-historical categories and methods of study. I have in mind a set of basic terms that could inform and motivate our discussion. These are: institutions, formations, means of production, identifications, forms, reproduction, and organisation. These are drawn from Raymond Williams' 1981 book Culture which presents the outline of a projected new field of study he called the 'historical-sociology of culture'. Understanding globalisation's impact on visual art and culture, arguably, requires such a radical inquiry. Jonathan Harris CAVA, University of Liverpool Globalisation and the Worlds of Contemporary Visual Art In my paper introducing the session I shall consider the future of institutionalised art history in the UK and North America, which is threatened by a number of developments ­changing and complex socio-cultural demographics affecting the choices and values of students applying to study in higher education, the restructuring of national and international job markets forcing universities to reorganise, reframe, and rename their undergraduate arts and humanities provision, and the recent charging of fees by English institutions bringing about a further dismal kind of 'modernisation' thought to be the way to compete better with elite US universities in research funding stakes. Arguably, these factors (themselves indices of corporate capitalist globalisation) provide an opportunity for scholars and students radically to recast the bases of their intellectual interests. I shall explore ways in which this potentially creative reorganisation may come to intersect - both positively and negatively - with emerging academic-institutional frameworks for teaching and research likely to instrumentalise such new forms of knowledge. Judith Rodenbeck Sarah Lawrence College, USA New Collectivism: How Globalization made the Artworld Useful The last decade has seen the proliferation of a new kind of collectivist practice. Different from the "nomadic" practices of site-specificity, other than the gift-economy of "relational aesthetics," and not quite the same as "Littoral art," these collaborative practices have sometimes been loosely (and unfortunately) clustered and curated under the rubric of "New Situationists". Groups like Sarai, 16Beaver, Ultra-red, and Retort have been foregrounded at major international art festivals from Venice to Kwangju; yet their presence indicates a problem for art history. While collective activities—from guilds to salons to groups-are not a new development, these new formations represent a new phenomenon, for their "productions" are more often than not textual and discursive, and only residually enter the exhibitionary economy. Without attempting a typology or a categorical assessment, it can nevertheless be argued that these formations share certain features: an emphasis on collaboration, an investment in autonomist politics, consistent engagement with issues of pedagogy, and often as not a developing and shared lexicon. This paper will identify a number of these groups and explore their shared features and their networks. It will also explore a provisional history and examine some possible consequences of the linguistic shifts marked by that developing lexicon. I am interested in how these groups emerged and in what their relationship is to the "artworld," from international/global festivals to museums to art schools to (increasingly theoretical) art history departments. I argue that these groups use "art" and its "institutions" as a kind of tactical nomenclature, as terms of convenience for non-instrumental pedagogical activities that our current definition of "art" cannot really encompass. Dennis Wardleworth Independent Scholar, UK The Parallel Development of Capitalism and Architecture in the Twentieth Century: Anglo-Persian to beyond petroleum: Neo-Classical to Post-Modem The large business corporation came into existence in the US and Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century. However the nature of the corporation has had to change considerably since then in response to a series of crises. The corporations that have survived have been transformed from organisations operating largely within nation-states to the globalised quasi-independent organisations we see today. Over the same period the forms of city-centre architecture, much of it commissioned by corporations, has undergone significant changes. I illustrate this using the headquarters building of BP in London as an example. I suggest that these parallel changes, in corporate organisation and in architectural form, are correlated. I propose as a linking cause the way in which the organisational changes and the crises that brought them about have affected the outlook and ambitions of members of the professional class. Finally, I suggest that this discussion also has implications for the wider history of art in the twentieth century. _72 Session 11 Globalisation and Art since 1945: Disciplinary Renewal or Transformation? Felipe Hernandez University of Liverpool South by North + West: Contesting Architectural History and Heritage in Latin America Architectural studies in Latin America have traditionally relied heavily on the exclusive selection of paradigmatic buildings as a way to construct coherent, linear, and homogeneous architectural theories and histories. This is clearly seen in the fact that architectural theorists and historians have focused their analyses mainly on the work of a few paradigmatic architects whose work complies with the parameters of modernist Euro-American architectural narratives. Not surprising^, the two most famous figures of Latin American architecture, Luis Barragan and Oscar Niemeyer, obtained international recognition after their individual exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and through numerous publications which circulated first in the USA, then in Europe, and much later in Mexico and Brazil when they were translated into Spanish and Portuguese respectwely. Such an approach has transcended the boundaries of architecture to become the basis for the selection of cultural heritage. In the past twenty years, UNESCO has included two Latin American sites and one building in the list of World Heritage: Brasilia (1987), the Ciudad UnK/ersitaria de Caracas (2000) and Luis Barragan House and Studio (2004). The inclusion of these three cases in the World Heritage list responds to the fact that they comply with the principles of modern architecture and urbanism as expressed in the CIAM manifestos and in the Athens Charter, or to the intelligent dialogue between modem architecture and some vernacular elements in the case of Barragan's own house and studio. This paper will, therefore, question the methods used in order to write the history of Latin American architectures and will contest the notion of heritage advanced by UNESCO. The paper demonstrates that existing histories have been written in order to reinforce a hierarchical system that grants perpetual authority to Euro-American architectural narratives while situating Latin American practices in a position of inferiority. As a result, most existing written histories about Latin American architecture will be rendered both inadequate and incomplete due to the fact that they do not correspond to the conditions of poverty, unemployment, and lack of education of the so-called minorities and the less dominant members of the society which, needless to say, represent the majority of the population in the three relevant countries. Judith Walsh University of Liverpool Irish Landscape Painting: Postcolonial Object of Nostalgia or Ideological Witness? This paper seeks to question how art historians employ the discourse of postcolonialism to interrogate Irish artistic practice and in particular the depiction of the Irish landscape. Postcolonial analysis is now integral to how those working in the domain of Irish studies rationalize contemporary society, pointing out that there is much to consider beyond the binary concepts of 'hegemony' and 'resistance'. But can the same be said for the art historian? If postcolonial analysis works to define the repercussions and legacies of colonialist culture in the contemporary world and in doing so refuses to treat culture as an autonomous and politically innocent domain of social life, then its application to the analysis of the depiction of the Irish landscape would appear to be straightforward. But for some the analysis of the landscape genre is not that complicated, for - like imperialism itself - landscape remains an idealized object of nostalgia in a postcolonial and postmodern era. However I would argue that it is primarily located within a discourse of identity constructed through a process of social, political and cultural conditioning. In Ireland the landscape genre is historically bound to the socio-cultural values of the Anglo-Irish middle class, a relationship that still has resonance today. Some contemporary visual artists explore the tension between the ideology supporting this relationship and current Irish identity (Willie Doherty, Kathy Prendergast) - post colonial theory must underpin any analysis of this tension. This paper will critique the critique of modem Irish landscape painting - asking: how can our understanding of the Irish landscape be more than nostalgic interest? August Davis The University of Liverpool Spectres and Spectacle: The visual culture of Martha Rosier During the past six years or so, the spectre of 'visual culture' has threatened to usurp the position previously held by 'art history' (the latter's shot-gun marriage with cultural and media studies having itself promised a catholic rubric under which all manifestations of 'the visual' are deemed significant enough for academic consideration). The AAH's February 2005 'Bulletin' issue no. 88 and 2006 Leeds conference sought to address this supposedly embattled position of art history directly. Yet, now, the heat seems to have abated, the frenzied concern to have subsided: so what of this great bout? This paper seeks to address the more than rhetorical point of differentiation between art history and visual culture and the varying scopes the two 'fields' permit in connection with artists' production, focusing on the case study of Martha Rosier and her expansive oeuvre / praxis. Through an exploration of her recent works such as Surface / Support, commissioned for Frieze Art Fair 2005, and her multi-decade works: Bringing the War Home (1966-72: 2004), In the Place of the Public, and Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975 and 2003), this paper will demonstrate why an expanded critique of visual culture is required in order to understand Roster's challenge to our globalised and unified 'society of the spectacle'. Visual Arts Journals tom Routiedge Early Popular Visual Culture HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY studies FT ™ \Y 0 R D b I IMJA G E Visit the website to view a free sample or find out more: www.informaworld.com/journals informaworld Digital Creativity Editors: Colin Beardon University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand and Lone Malmborg IT University, Denmark Volume 18, 2007,4 issues per year Print ISSN: 1462-6268 Online ISSN: 1744-3806 Digital Creativity's a major peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of the creative arts and digital technologies Early Popular Visual Culture Editors: Simon Popple, University of Leeds, UK and Vanessa Toulmin University of Sheffield, UK Volume 5, 2007, 3 issues per year Print ISSN: 1746-0654 Online ISSN: 1746-0662 Early Popular Visual Culture (EPVC) is a peer-reviewed, academic journal dedicated to stimulating researc and interdisciplinary studies in relation to all forms of popular visual culture before 1930. History of Photography Editor: Graham Smith. University of St Andrews, UK Volume 31, 2007,4 issues per year Pnnt ISSN: 0308-7298 History of Photography is an international journal devoted exclusively to the history and criticism of the basic semantic unit of all modern media, the photograph. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes Editor: John Dixon Hunt, University of Pennsylvania, USA Volume 27, 2007, 4 issues per year Print ISSN: 1460-1176 Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes addresses itself to readers with a serious interest in the subject, and is now established as the main place in which to publish scholarly work on international garden history. Third Text Editors: Rasheed Araeen arc Ziauddin Sardar, London, UK Volume 21, 2007,6 issues per year Print ISSN: 0952-8822 Online ISSN: 1475-5297 Third Text is an international scholarly journal dedicated to providing critical perspectives on art and visual culture Visual Resources An International Journal of Documentation Editor: Helene E. Roberts Dartmouth College, USA Volume 23. 2007,4 issues per year Print ISSN: 0197-3762 Visual Resources: An international Journal of Documentation is devoted to tie study of images an Visual Studies Published on behalf of the International Visual Sociology Association Editor: Darren Newbury, University of Central England, UK Volume 22. 2007.3 issues per year Pnnt ISSN 1472-586X Online ISSN: 1472-5878 Visual Studies is a major peer-reviewed journal. Published on behalf of the International Visual Sociology Association the journal will provide the key resource where issues of a visual nature. Word & Image Senior Editor: John Dixon Hunt, University of Pennsylvania, USA Volume 23. 2007,4 issues per year Print ISSN: 0266-6286 Wad & Image concerns itself with the study of the encounters, dialogues and mutual csteboration (or hostility) between verbal and visual languages, one of the prime new areas of humanistic criticism. Routiedge Taylor & Francis Croup Art andVisual Culture ~ . bOOkS from Routledge Seminar SERIES EDITOR James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Ways Around Modernism Stephen Bann In the second volume of Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts Stephen Bann examines the arguments tor the centrality of French modernist painting, focusing particularly on the notion of the modernist break, as it has been interpreted with regard to painters Ske Manet and Ingres January 2007 234x156:144pp Pb: 978-0-415-97422-6 £10.99 • tic Versus Aesthetics Photography Is Art History The Limits Art History Theory Global? and State of Versus Edited by James Elkins Edited by James Elkins Art Criticism Aesthetics December 2006:216x138:128pp December 2006:216x138:128pp Edited by James Elkins Edited by James Elkins Pb: 978-0-415-97783-8: £10.99 Pb: 978-0-415-97785-2: £10.99 June 2007: 216x138:128pp 2005 216x138:128pp Pb: 978-0-415-97787-6: £10.99 Pb: 978-0-415-97689-3: £12.99 Art History: Art History: Self Image Theory for On The The Basics The Key Technology, Art History Strange Representation, Grant Pooke, University Concepts Jae Emerling University Place of and the of Kent, UK and Diana of California Los Angeles, Jonathan Harris Contemporary Religionin Newall University of Liverpool, UK Subject USA Contemporary The perfect book for A systematic, reliable and Amelia Jones, University Theory for Art History Art students, Art History: of Manchester, UK provides clear and concise accessible reference guide James Elkins The Basics introduces to the disciplines of art Including over one introductions to thirty key readers to art history and figures of contemporary Can contemporary art say history and visual culture, hundred illustrations from its methodologies, guiding theory including. Freud, anything about spirituality? Art History: The Key mainstream film to video art, them through various Concepts contains entries perfermance art and the Marx, Adorno and Spivak, Answering this question theoretical concepts and and more, James FJkins on over two hundred terms visual arts, Self/Image 2005 ways of looking at images. 234x156: 264po explores the curious integral to the study of art, explores how technology design and culture, has affected artist's ability Pb 978-0-415-97364-9 disconnection between 198x129: 256op to express themselves. £10.99 spirituality and current art. September 2006 Pb 978-0-415-37308-1 September 2006 2004 216x138: 360pp Pb: 978-0-415-31977-5 234x156: 280pp 234x156. 152pp £12.99 Pb: 978-0-415-34522-4 Pb 978-0-415-96989-5 £19.99 £14.99 Visit the website to find out more: Routledge www.routledge.com Taylor S> Francis Croup Session 12 Debbie Lewer, University of Glasgow Christian Weikop, University of Sussex Contested Histories in German Visual Culture 1871 —1990 German visual culture has produced many different representations of and engagements with history, the past and the remains of the past. In terms of form, content, programme and ideology, this has been - and still is - a 'contested' field. This session will examine relations between the material traces of the past, narratives of German history and the critical and conceptual frameworks for a range of objects and aesthetic practices in Germany since the late nineteenth century. How have aesthetic appropriations of the past in German visual culture affirmed or critiqued dominant political culture? What is the significance of the presence or absence of particular histories of, or in, art? To what extent is the envisioned past indexed to the social and political imperatives of the present and stakes for the future? How has art practice negotiated the dialectic between history and experience? Methodologically, should we be "contesting" the way histories of histories in recent German art and culture are established? Addressing such questions, the session aims to encourage debate on the "contested" nature of the (German) past. Paul Fox University College London Visual Narratives of Conflict in Wilhelmine Culture My paper argues that Wilhelmine visual narratives of military experience embodied the virtues of a quintessential^ 'German way' of war in a manner that served the hegemonic formulation of national identity. This inquiry represents a deliberate departure from (art) historical approaches which address warfare in the context of universal themes such as heroism and sacrifice, or the politics of commemoration. Instead, it takes as its subject matter the representation of officers and of the command and control of military operations. The paper pivots around an analysis of academic art practice. It asks questions about the manner in which established modes of representing war were transformed by the appearance of battlefield photography, and how this phenomenon contributed to new ways of proffering quintessential^ German ways of thinking and acting in war. My conceptual framework encompasses the cultural force of nostalgia. In Wilhelmine culture yearning for the physical and emotional contours of the homeland was conditioned by a central strand of Prussian history which invited an unreflexive, nostalgic appropriation of past victories. I adopt Svetlana Boym's view that fantasies of the past are nevertheless determined by the needs of the present, and have a direct impact on realities of the future. I argue that although visual narratives of conflict may have served to encourage Germans to accede to the notion of a collective identity through an unproblematic empathy with Prussia's military past, such narratives paradoxically stimulated anxiety about both the nature of future conflict and the Army's reputation for performing excellence. Debbie Ascher Barnstone Technical University, Delft 'Modernism' Reconsidered in the work of Hans Scharoun This paper will use projects by the architect Hans Scharoun to contest one of the most problematic aspects of the historiography of Modernism — the system by which architects and their buildings are usually classified in aesthetic movements. Scharoun possessed one of the most original creative minds of his time. Sometimes-classified Expressionist, sometimes Functionalist, his work defies easy categorization because its formal characteristics changed continuously. The Glaseme Kette sketches (1918-1920) are decidedly Expressionist in their transparent crystalline forms; the theater fantasies (1922-3) are dynamic and sculptural; the Wohnheim for the Breslau Werkbund Exhibition (1929) uses the white stucco, steel and glass of Neues Bauen. Of course most architects pass through different aesthetic phases as they and their work mature. But what if the formal attributes of the mature work change? More importantly, what if the architect's ideas contradict received aesthetic categories? Scharoun was typical of a group who disparaged ideological approaches to design. He accepted many of the formulations of the avant-garde, but rejected others, in what seems a confusing mix. His projects combine intuitive with rational thinking, representation with abstraction, concern for Volk and Heimat with modem housing design, reverence for new technology with a suspicion of the machine as inspiration for art. His work shows the complexity of the human imagination and its capacity to grapple simultaneously with many, often conflicting, impulses. It also demonstrates the inadequacy of aesthetic categories that tend to reduce the complex interests of individual creative minds to a set of uninteresting finite possibilities. Joerg Niehoegen University of Birmingham The painter Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938) - The visual expression of a regional Bavarian identity? Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938) is acknowledged by many art historians to be a quintessential member of the Munchner Gruppe of the Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic, for which a regional structure has been claimed over the years. The Munchner Gruppe formed one of its regional centres, but the meaning of this label is open to contestations. Does it merely refer to a place or location or does ft connote a unifying Munich/Bavarian regional identity? Regional identity is currently a significant area of enquiry. Historically regions were of great importance in Germany, which did not come into existence as a unified nation state until 1871. Within this nation state regions lost much of their political significance. However, based on their territorial, symbolic and institutional shapes they retained some of their institutional independence and cultural practices, artistic practice being one of these, which formed the basis of an identity of a region. Bavaria with its capital Munich was particularly successful in maintaining this identity. However, for the formation of a regional identity, which is part of an indMdual's personal identity, the identification of people with above cultural practices and its institutions is paramount. In this paper I will examine how far Georg Schrimpfs artistic practice offers this identification with Bavaria as a region and how far it is a visual expression of a regional Bavarian identity. Through an iconographic examination of some of Schrimpf's images and placing these in the context of his locale, networks, private and public memory, and Bavaria's history, I will make a case for the rich spread of his identity. Yet within this diversity many of his paintings clearly express his identification with Bavarian artistic tradition and cultural practices, a Bavarian identity. _78 Session 12 Contested Histories in German Visual Culture 1871 —1990 Debbie Lewer University of Glasgow A Revolutionary Prototype: The German Peasants' War of 1525 in the Art and Theory of the Weimar Left After 1918, many artists and writers were seized by a new sense of liberation and purpose. It is widely recognised that the "spirit of November" galvanised revolutionary aspirations (and pseudo-revolutionary gestures) among the German avant-garde and intelligentsia. However, this paper will argue that our understanding of the cultural politics of this period can be further enhanced if we also consider the ways in which German history - particularly of the Reformation period - became relevant to important conceptual models for the politicised avant-garde. For some artists and theorists, the German Peasants' War of 1525 provided a vital prototype as the "first Socialist war" (August Bebel).ln 1925, the 400th anniversary of the uprisings inspired poems, plays and celebrations, though these came at a time when many revolutionary hopes had been thwarted. A broad and complex iconography of agitation can be found in many works by the Weimar avant-garde. A further aim of this paper is therefore to investigate the interrelationship between representations of the radical reformer Thomas Muntzer (described by Friedrich Engels as "an outright political agitator") and modes of avant-garde practice related to agitation. By examining familiar and lesser-known texts and images from such perspectives, this papa will suggest wider conclusions about the politicised apprehension of German history and its rehearsals in visual culture. Charles W. Haxthausen Williams College The Cathedral of Metropolis From Wilhelm Worringer's Formprobleme der Gotik (1911) to Walter Gropius's "Bauhaus Proclamation" (1919), the Gothic was a central trope of the 'expressionist' movement in painting, sculpture, and architecture. For many German artists and intellectuals of this era the Gothic cathedral signified not only a lost social and cultural harmony that they longed to restore, but also an integration of the fine and applied arts with architecture in the service of collective belief. This idea, passionately articulated in Gropius's text, found its icon in the Lyonel Feininger woodcut of a Gothic cathedral that illustrated it, unofficially dubbed 'the cathedral of socialism.' As film scholar Klaus Kreimeier (1992) has noted, these ideas also had currency among certain members of the German film industry during the 1920s. The Gothic cathedral in Fritz Lang's futuristic film Metropolis (1927) is arguably the richest example of the adoption of this expressionist myth in Weimar cinema-Lang scholar Tom Gunning (2000) has even proposed that "the collision between the Gothic and the modern" constitutes "the true conflict in Metropolis." Yet no one has adequately examined the implications of Lang's use of this trope within the larger contemporary discourse on the Gothic. I want to argue that in Metropolis Lang emblematically uses the cathedral not only as the site for the film's naive message of familial and social reconciliation, but also to suggest that film, rather than traditional visual media, was now the most effective medium for realizing the expressionist agenda of artistic, cultural, and social reintegration. Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen and Katrin Blum Deutscher Kunstverlag / Freie Universitaet Berlin Photographs of Adolf Hitler in German Historiography after 1945 During the period of National Socialism, photography was the most important medium for the perpetuation of the "Fuhrer" myth. The stability of Nazi rule, and its acceptance by large parts of the German populace, was mainly based on the faith in the system's uppermost representative, Adolf Hitler. The image of Hitler, meanwhile, had a special, even system-supporting function. Apart from Riefenstahl's films about Nazi party conferences, it was mainly photos and paintings of Hitler that generated, and kept alive, the "Fuhrer" myth. Less is known about Hitler's second career in the media, which began in the late 1960s. After the end of the Third Reich, public displays of Hitler pictures were initially prohibited. Since the German people had previously had a close emotional relationship with pictorial representations of the "Fuhrer", and since the abrupt ending of that relationship resulted in the Germans' inability to mourn it, photographic depictions of his physical frame were seen as less than opportune in the immediate aftermath of the war - with regard to both the media, and scientific discussions of the Nazi state. This paper deals with the changes in usage and reception that photographs of Hitler have been subjected to since 1945. Employing the examples of certain "icons", it demonstrates the extent to which the same photographs are supposed to support different interpretations and evaluations in different contexts of publication. Veronica Davies Open University "Closing the Wounds"? The role of exhibitions in post-war Germany In July, 1945, representatives of the British occupying forces in the British Zone of North West Germany met the assistant Art Editor of the Rheinische Zeitung to explain that 'British Policy was putting nothing in the way of permitting artists to continue with their trade, but that it was up to the artists themselves to get an exhibition going.' This put the onus on artists' professional organisations, and on museum directors and curators returning to their posts, or taking up new ones in the turbulent circumstances of the period immediately following World War II, to make decisions about the display of art which had, of necessity, to be visibly different from what had been permitted under the Nazi regime. This paper will examine the nature of art exhibitions held in the second half of the 1940s in the British Zone, and especially the challenges to artists and curators of their role in 'closing the wounds' inflicted by the Third Reich, a recurrent metaphor of the period. In particular, exhibitions at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, will be discussed, since its catalogues and archives provide vivid examples of the debates current at the time. These include how a population induced for over twelve years to see certain art practices as 'degenerate', in particular what had been ­sometimes loosely - termed 'expressionism', could be encouraged to look at this art anew; and how a public for the new art of a (re)emerging post-war generation could be created, so that they could indeed 'continue with their trade' Jennie Hawksley De Montford University Lidice: One History - Two Views This paper seeks to address the way in which a crucial aspect of the shared German twentieth century past, the experience of National Socialism, appeared differently in the twin cultures emerging in Germany after the Second World War. Using two visual cultural case studies, one hailing from the German Democratic Republic to the east and one from the Federal Republic to the west, which both address the same event, the massacre perpetrated by the National Socialists in Lidice in 1942,1 intend to examine the ways in which this most difficult part of history which precedes both temporally and causally the territorial fracture after 1945 figured differently in the formulations of a national historical narrative in the developing cultures of east and west. In these case studies, visual culture acts as a barometer of the way in which two societies, officially ideologically different but nevertheless subject to ethnic sameness and a common recent history of national wholeness, constructed views of a shared experience, pre-1945, which functioned as an index of the differences between them post-1945. Here, art, its form and its promulgation, acted as a vehicle for the transmission of meanings which identified the differing ideological values of the two post-war Germanies, yet at the same time exposed the places of difficulty, in both east and west, in constructing both a post-war and therefore post National Socialist view of German national history and narratives of national cultural history. Antje Kramer Institut national d'histoire de I'art, Paris "Hopes and Fears of Our Time"- The discursive structures of Western German art critique in the 1950s In the post-war process of the reconstruction of identity, of the "image of man" (Menschenbild), abstract painting becomes the paragon of freedom and democracy functioning as a strong cultural strategy for the desired West-integration. Instead of a "German art or style", the accent is placed on abstraction as a "universal language" which should be able to accomplish - far beyond all political efforts - the reconciliation between nations and people. In the 1950's, key-words like "freedom", "universalism" and "authenticity" characterize as much the art publications as the renewing with Classic Modernism. Besides Will Grohmann, it is Werner Haftmann who marks deeply the rhetoric of art critique and historicity with his numerous publications, like his famous Malerei im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert in 1954, and with the co-direction of the first Documentas. In creating continuity between the international Modem avant-garde and German post-war production, Haftmann creates a myth based on a perpetual supranational tradition. A myth which resoles not only the debates about "German identity", but which also seems to be, by the use of a certain vocabulary, the (unconscious) result of the contemporary conflict due to the cold war. Arnold Bartetzky University of Leipzig Buildings as Narratives of History: Architectural reconstruction projects in Germany from 1945 to the present In recent years, the re-unrted Germany has been experiencing a boom of reconstruction projects for destroyed historic buildings of symbolic value. The current reconstruction wave, the most prominent examples of which are the Church of Our Lady in Dresden and the rebuilding plans for the Royal Castle in Berlin, is not unprecedented. It is rooted in a long history of architectural reconstruction practice and theory, reaching back to the early 19th century. This paper traces the changing attitudes towards reconstruction from 1945 to the present, focusing on some paradigmatic projects in both parts of Germany. The reconstruction is regarded as a narrative of local or national history expressed by means of architecture. This narrative is to a certain extent fictitious by definition, because it is always based on the principle of selection. In this way actions of reconstruction can establish tempting visions of the past by neglecting certain periods and ruptures of history. Thus, special emphasis is placed on the motives and functions of the projects with regard to current conceptions of politics of history and identity building. What should the reconstructed buildings remind us of? And what is the purpose of this remembrance? What aspects of history does the reconstruction correct, suppress, or compensate, what should it make us forget? In a word: what do the re-erected historic buildings offer to society in terms of identity? _80 Session 12 Contested Histories in German Visual Culture 1871 —1990 Sabine Kriebel University College Cork Trockel's Beuys: A Troubled Inheritance Often hailed as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Joseph Beuys and his artistic legacy exceed the sum of his drawings, objects, installations, and performances. As the self-nominated healer of postwar German art and identity, Beuys manufactured a carefully-orchestrated public artistic persona based on a regenerative, nature-bound, Utopian, and shamanistic platform that was actualized in artworks, lectures, interviews, teachings and political engagements. As one wry commentator once noted, "In many ways, Beuys's greatest work has always been himself." While Beuys is credited with radically reshaping the terms of artistic practice after 1945, he has also been vilified by the Left for his essentialist, mythic, transcendentalist—and according to Benjamin Buchloh, crypto-fascist—artistic strategies. It would seem then, that savvy feminist artist Rosemarie Trockel. critically engaged with 1980s consumerism, would have little investment in Beuys's postwar shamanism. Her project is sooner ironic than messianic, anti-idealist rather than Utopian. When interviewed about her relation to artistic predecessors Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, she replied: "For me and in my position as a woman it is more difficult, as women, have historically always been left out." This paper, however, excavates Trockel fraught dialogue with Joseph Beuys and the immediate post-war era in Germany. While her quotations of Warhol or Duchamp are feminist re-interpretations of silkscreens and readymades. Trockel's appropriations of Beuys are deliberate detoumements that simultaneously attack and pay homage. In this paper about troubled inheritances and re-interpreted histories, Trockel's enigmatic, recondite works take on new resonance when contextualized by their dialogue with Beuys. Christian Weikop University of Sussex The Birth and Rebirth of 'New German Painting' The classification of 'New German Painting' first surfaced in the early 1980s in the art criticism of Donald Kuspit, who was then engaged in a critical dialogue with the Marxist art theoretician Benjamin Buchloh. The contested field was 'neo-expressionism', which Buchloh endeavoured to associate with a regressive 'neo-conservatism'. The first part of this paper will attempt to unravel certain key ideological strands of the Buchloh-Kuspit debate, exploring its origins and how it has continued to play out until the present day. These issues are complicated by the fact that the term 'New German Painting' has recently resurfaced in a Prestel publication by Christoph Tannert, and has been applied mainly to the work of Neo Rauch and the artists of the 'New Leipzig School'. Taken collectively, the visual practices of these post-Wende artists, are far more diverse than those of the earlier generation of pre-Wende 'neo-expressionists' endorsed by Kuspit. However, there is certain cyclical quality with respect to current debates on the status of German painting that recalls the earty 1980s. The second part of this paper will ruminate on the newness of 'New German Painting' in the wake of the Kuspit-Buchloh debate, with a view to understanding whether this term is in any sense meaningful, or simply a cynical Saatchi-like marketing strategy, a label devised in full knowledge of this 'cyclicality'. Matthew Sillence, University of East Anglia, Norwich Amelia Yeates, University of Birmingham Session 13 Contested Evidence For art historians, evidence is fundamental to the creation of an argument and can take many forms. This might be visual: the artwork itself, drawings, photographic or video records; oral, such as the artist's interview or eye-witness accounts or anecdotes; textual, such as interview transcripts, exhibition reviews, sales information, manuscript field notes or diaries. However, many of these sources may not survive, thus preventing corroboration and limiting our interrogation of a work of art. Moreover, extant sources may be contested when we begin to consider the purposes they served around the time of their creation and the degree to which they have been manipulated or altered. One might also consider how revisionist accounts of familiar subjects can change our perception of the evidence before us. This session explores how new theoretical perspectives could be used to re-read existing bodies of work or provide new insights for art historians. It will also examine on what levels certain evidence may be admissible in our work and on what grounds it could be challenged by our peers. Ultimately, in investigating our own working practices, we might consider how our own studies coalesce to form a body of evidence for future scholars. Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen Courtauld Institute of Art, London Gender and Childhood in the Soviet East: Painting the stereotype From model pioneer to future cotton farmer the images of childhood during the Soviet era reappeared with logical consistency. A Russian girl in a red scarf reads the new decree of the Party; an Asian girl in red scarf walks across the fields towards her Utopian future. In recent examinations of the Soviet art including large exhibition projects, issues as wide-ranging as labour, womanhood, and personality cult were examined in depth. However both the attitudes to the East and to childhood, even though extremely evident remain unchallenged. Not surprisingry then, the majority of images involving children, especially young girls appear in works that are supposed to represent the realities in the Central Asian republics. One such work even received the Stalin prize. With the amval of Socialist Realism in Soviet Union, art gained an immediate political role; what place, then, was reserved for the image of youth within this tightly-surveyed structure? In relation to the Soviet East, images of children became a prime medium of expression - this was neither a speculation on the condition of childhood in the area at the time, nor was it an expression of sentimentality. Socialist Realist paintings of children can be viewed both as anachronistic art works, or as charged, albeit anachronistically unreliable, documents of the contested era. Mathias Fubah Alubafi Reading University Rethinking Authenticity in African Art The connoisseur's taste is arguably the main reason for the emergence of the concept of Authenticity in African art. Scholarly research on the concept of authenticity, especially as it applies to African art has increased and there is an increasing demand by art dealers, collectors and museums for particular forms of African art on grounds that they are purely traditional pieces. Such a demand seems to suggest that meaning for African art is determined by the art collectors, dealers and the African middleman than the African artists themselves. Few artists and researchers have actually confronted the issue of who creates meaning in African art. Why? A popular African proverb states that, 'onry hunters understand the language of the births.' Authenticity, some say, is a language best understood at the crossroads where the African middleman meets the European African art dealer. The hunter must do everything possible to provide just what the art dealer wants in order to remain in business. Whatever the reason maybe, the issue of authenticity in African art remains a highly controversial and the more we continue to interrogate it, the more closely we get to resolving it. This paper will attempt a conceptual examination of the literature that has been produced on the concept of authenticity in African art, vis-a-vis the experiences of local art producers in the Grassfields, in order to draw a line between the different meanings of the concept. Jan D. Cox University of Bristol Rodrigo Moynihan and the 'missing Minton' - the photograph as agent of revelation and Inertia Two of the most noteworthy exhibits in the 'Sixty for '51' competition at the Festival of Britain were Lucian Freud's Interior at Paddington and Rodrigo Moynihan's The Teaching Staff of the Painting School, Royal College of Art, 1949-50. Freud's work, vibrating with 'the cruel intentness of a frosty morning' contrasts markedly with Moynihan's epic-sized portrayal, which suffers from both the protracted nature of its title and the passivity of its composition. However, Moynihan's picture is provoking in far more than its critical reception. How does the fact that this near life-size work was based on a small black and white photograph affect our contemplation of the picture? The photograph not only provides a factual pictorial basis, but also compelling evidence of the absence of the lone figure of John Minton from the original photographic composition. Critics who have based their analysis on Mintons isolation and expression, 'sealed up in his own apartness', must now consider that Minton's positioning is also based on pictorial expediency. The photograph can thus act as a piece of informed evidence, yet in contrast can produce inertia, eliminating energy and movement from the artist's work. Francis Bacon avoided this pitfall by using photographs as 'triggers of ideas', exemplified by his use of pictures of Minton's friend Henrietta Moraes, initially retreating from the image and then 'returning onto the fact more violently'. Although Moynihan was aware that 'photos are admirable when accidental', the static atmosphere of a snapshot frozen in time pervades his composition. Michelle Gewurtz University of Leeds Who Gives the Name? The Problematics of Art with No Title This paper addresses misreadings of the work of German artist Jeanne Mammen, who was working as an illustrator for burgeoning mass print media during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). The limited English language scholarship that exists on Mammen acknowledges that she was a critical observer even though her images were complicit in the construction of commercial stereotypes of modem German women in Weimar Berlin. However, my examination will show the limitations of art historical analyses particularly as they pertain to incorrect understandings of the complex issues of the titling of Mammen's work and the contexts in which they appeared. As an independent illustrator, Mammen sent her work to her publishers as untitled pieces in order to maximize her chances for sales. Titling the work, and thus fixing its meaning, limited the chance that the image would be used, as the editor could not easily incorporate the image into any one article. The original watercolours and lithographs are now catalogued at the Jeanne-Mammen-Gesellschaft in Berlin as titled works of art. In the catalogue raisonne the works are listed according to titles given by publishers. Consequently, primary titles are designated by referencing the title of the publication where the work first appeared. Alternate titles are listed as notes in each catalogued entry. Much of the analysis produced by English language scholars hinges on these assigned titles, and subsequent research has not contested a particular understanding of these works. I will demonstrate why this is problematic through an analysis of the works as untitled. _84 Session 13 Contested Evidence Darrelyn Gunzburg Open University Looking Back: The transgression of social codes explored through the direct gaze in Fra Angelico's San Marco Altarpiece (The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints c.1438-40) when compared with Madonna and Child with Eight Saints (also known as Madonna delle ombre c.1450), San Marco, east dormitory This paper presents contested evidence for how a contemporary female audience may have encountered the direct gaze in Italian religious paintings of the mid-Quattrocento. Specifically it compares and contrasts two works by the same artist for the same order and in the same location and notes the differences in the exemplars who carry the direct gaze within each painting. It begins from the position that it is appropriate for a twenty-first century audience to pay attention to the cultural customs of the Quattrocento regarding how a lay audience and, in particular, women were socialized to look at their environment and at whom and addresses questions relating to lay access and the laity's reaction to the imagery of altarpieces, as well as opinions that the sacred, liminal space of the church was also a space in which the erotic could flourish through the gaze. This paper then draws on the evidence of the code and conduct books of the time written by men, letters and works written by women, the nature of medieval sexuality, and contemporary thinking regarding the nature of the gaze through the disciplines of gender and visual culture, psychology and memory, and offers an overlooked perspective. Contributing to the themes of contestation of this conference, it would appear that, despite the proscriptive texts of the fourteenth century, when a woman encountered the direct gaze of a man in a religious painting, another dialectic was occurring, a possible unintentional, or even intentional, crossing of social codes. Kochi Okada Goldsmiths College, University of London The Emergence of Post-Soviet Arts Valuing in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1991-2004) This paper is about the new, often contradictory, criteria for the economic, moral, and social valuation of artists and their work in different contexts in post-Soviet Tashkent. When the Soviet Union ended, the overarching Soviet institution, the Union of Artists of the USSR, also collapsed. This institution had been solely responsible for the production, consumption and circulation of arts, and for regulating subordinate Republican Unions of Arts. Each national Union was now independent; later, these too, were supplanted by several different institutions and social domains (the independent state's commissioning system, the illegal art market conducted in foreign currency, the traditional mahalla neighbourhoods of Tashkent, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Besh Agach mosque) that affected the production and consumption of painting in the post-Soviet era. With the Union of Artists' authority ended, I examine the process of developing legitimisation in some of the emerging social configurations such as the illegal art market conducted in foreign currency and the mahalla neighbourhoods, using the insights from Weber's typology of authority. I emphasize the importance of arts to legitimise both the Soviet and the post-Soviet states. I consider the effect of the commodification of paintings on the idea in the Soviet period that an artist was a living embodiment of his work's moral, economic and social values - and how in some areas this connection between the person of the painter and the value of the product endures in different forms. Keunsoo Park Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London Fashion Art in South Korea This presentation will introduce the practice called Fashion Art in S. Korea by addressing its characteristics and its conceptual background, in the context of nationalism and globalization. The practice has been named as Fashion Art since the term first appeared as a title of the monumental festival demonstrating extensive fields, denoted as (Yesoolyisang, translated as Arts Wear in English), Art Fabric, Fashion Illustration, Performance, Fashion Photography/ Multimedia and other events in Seoul in 1997. The origin of the practice has been generally understood as deriving from the American Art to Wear movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. However, this paper will demonstrate its distinctive features, which relate to a Korean traditional aesthetic. This presentation will show some examples of Fashion Art works revealing the traditional sensitivities formed on the basis of local philosophy that have been amalgamated into contemporary Fashion Art works. It will also explain how particular social conditions relating to Korean history have contributed to the formation of Fashion Art practice. Against the background of contemporary globalization, the presentation will pose the question, how can Fashbn Art in S. Korea, based on a different philosophy and social setting, be properly evaluated by the Western viewpoint and value system? Helen Rawling Kingston University, London Contested Evidence: Abolitionist Artworks and the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool With the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade this year (2007), it is timely to reconsider the works of art that were produced for the abolition movement. These pieces of art were created not purely for aesthetic purposes, but to promote a cause and to stimulate public awareness and support. The art works range from etchings of life on board the slave ships and paintings of life in the plantations to campaign medallions and the plates made by Wedgwood to campaign for the ending of the slave trade. They aimed to highlight the common humanity of the slaves. However, Marcus Wood (2000) argues that these pieces may have served to fix the notion of black people as inferior in the mind of the British and American publics. He suggests that the focus on black people, portrayed en masse as victims, may militate against the need to see each person as an individual capable of suffering pain. Wood argues that, in 2007 as these pieces take centre stage in museums around the world, they may, paradoxically, result in a silencing of black histories and a focus on white philanthropy instead. My paper will assess Wood's hypothesis within the specific context of the newly constructed International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. I will use this case study to evaluate Wood's arguments and in particular, to address the issues from a curatorial perspective. If we accept this revision of the evidence, how should such pieces be handled within a museum or gallery? Are there some recommendations that can be made for the way in which these art works are curated in the 21st century? Feng Su University of Central England, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design On the interpretation of cloud imageries in Chinese visual culture Historical evidence does not only constitute the vital ground for such or such a theoretical explanation of the past, it can also be essential to understand the present. Such is the case with the ways cloud imageries have been visually reinterpreted in Chinese contemporary visual culture. These imageries have a very long tradition in Chinese art. They have both pertained throughout history and evolved into rich and complex visual systems, which can be seen at all levels of Chinese traditional art and life. Such ancient imageries still play a vital role in Chinese contemporary art practices, which not only show their enduring vitality but also the potential for further developments. To understand contemporary cloud imageries, it is essential to be aware of their historical backgrounds, or "horizons", to use a concept that German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer held dear. The paper therefore considers particular examples of representations of clouds in Chinese contemporary visual arts in the light of the historical evidence of their tradition, and reflects on the fundamental issues in interpretations that stem from it. It is by disclosing the relationship between its "past" and "present" lives, that the continuous evolution, mutation, and re-interpretation of the culture of cloud imageries can be worked out, and that its significance in the construction of the specific national identity of China can be grasped. Hopefully, this study induces each of us to reassess our interpretative attitude with regard to these "living" ancient visual traditions in the context of contemporary culture. Hannah Williams Courtauld Institute of Art, London Coypel's Libertine Children: Challenging Ways of Looking in Eighteenth-Century France A strange picture of partially naked children masquerading in contemporary adult fashions, Charles-Antoine Coypel's painting of Children Playing at the Toilette (1728) poses a challenge to the art historian. Not only does it present a contested image of the child as a sexually cognisant agent, requiring the modem viewer to take into account the historical specificity of the concept of childhood, this unconventional painting also hampers the task of analysis in other ways. With the absence of any similar painted representations, the work does not fit neatly within the visual traditions of early eighteenth-century France, and a lack of documentary evidence relating to its commission further frustrates the investigation. How then can we interpret the content of such a unique image and understand the meanings it may have conveyed for its eighteenth-century viewers? In this paper, I suggest an interdisciplinary approach to analysing this painting that explores the work's subject matter and aesthetic language in relation to the discourse of libertinage, an aristocratic philosophy usually associated with literary studies. This paper offers a framework for understanding the shifting relationship between pleasure and moral critique that characterises this unusual work. While emphasising the value of an art historical approach that engages with both interdisciplinary material and methods of analysis, I am primarily concerned with understanding the distinct contribution to cultural discourse that is made by the visual - explored here through an attention to the processes of viewing, the work's shifting audiences and the concomitant semantic mobility of the image. Chris Whitehead, Newcastle University Bernadette Buckley, Newcastle University Session 14 Museums and the Construction of Art Histories What are the roles of art museums and galleries in the construction of narratives of art and of art history as a discipline? This session examines recent museum and gallery initiatives which seek either to challenge or to further invest in conventional art historical narratives, categories and canons. It asks how museums and galleries seek to build on or interrupt the creation of art historical narratives - for example through forms of display, collecting, deaccessioning and programming exhibitions, or through the attribution of a special national value to specific works of art. The intellectual project of rethinking art history in the museum is inextricable from institutional and cultural policies and politics and from funding opportunities. This institutional confusion of intellectual revisionism, display imperatives and the politically and economically contingent nature of boundary work is of special interest, as it illuminates the essentially contingent (and therefore 'impure'?) nature of the representation of art histories in museums and galleries. This session builds on, and brings together, a number of bodies of thought. These include: studies of the museum and gallery as art historical 'text'; considerations about the relationships between 'art' and 'visual culture'; developing interests in the 'new institutionalism'; interests in the formation of artists' museums and archives; studies of disciplines and disciplinarily; and studies of art historical narratives both within and beyond the museum. Alexandra Stara Kingston University Aestheticising the Other. The new Musee du Quai Branly in Paris Ideas of boundaries and contestation raise questions about the nature of the centre and convention. More often the not, the apparent opposition is a more subtle relationship of agreement and even outright necessity ­whether politico-economical, cultural or philosophical. The museum as key vehicle of (art) historical narratives has been under explicit reconsideration for several decades. Both theory and practice have been seeking to expand the conventional limits of its representational possibilities and address fundamental problems, which have traditionally identified the institution with problematic ideologies and power structures. What has become clear at this point is that the genuine rethinking of the institution and the reshaping of its boundaries requires a thorough revisiting of its disciplinary centre. This paper will engage with the above themes through the critical discussion of a major new museum: the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. Consolidating the collections of two older museums in a custom-designed building by architect Jean Nouvel, the Quai Branly proposes a departure from the 'conventional' anthropological and ethnographic narratives of its precursors. Architecture, design and curatorship are co-ordinated so as to offer the exhibits as aesthetic fragments of a gigantic, mysterious poem, aiming, among other things, to overcome the intellectual inheritance of colonialism in favour of a universalizing artistic legitimacy. The analysis and critique of this approach and the specific results at the Quai Branly raise important questions about the representational possibilities of the museum and the scope of art history, as dialogue between boundary and centre. Stijn Van De Vyver Ghent University Laying Down the Law: Flemish Masterpieces Law and the construction of narratives in museums of contemporary art In this paper I will give an insight in the consequences the Flemish Masterpieces Law (Topstukkendecreet or TSD) has on the construction of narratives in museums of contemporary art. The TSD is a law for safeguarding key items of national heritage within the Flemish region of Belgium. Since its approval in 2003 it was used twice by the government to intervene in the field of contemporary art: it led to the purchase of Marcel Broodthaers' Pense-Bete and of Panamarenko's Prova Car. Both works became part of the art collection of the government and were given on a long-term loan to one of the Flemish museums. Broodthaers' Pense-Bete moved to the SMAK in Ghent where it will function as a starting point for a permanent Broodthaers display. Panamarenko's Prova Car was up to its purchase part of the SMAK collection, but afterwards moved to the MUHKA in Antwerp. I argue the TSD has already had a vast impact on 20th century art history in Banders. By labelling a contemporary art work as exceptional and creating an official narrative, art history is being rewritten. The construction of new and fresh narratives is stopped in a drastic manner and traditional displays are forced upon the museums. Victoria Preston Birkbeck College, University of London Deconstructing Art History, Constructing Visual Culture This paper addresses the impact of institutional strategies, cultural policy and funding imperatives on the rethinking of art history in cultural spaces. It draws on the work of Dikovitskaya on the study of the visual after the cultural turn. To what extent are visual studies an appropriate extension of art history or do they rather challenge the traditional discipline of art history? If visual culture is seen as a cause of, rather than merety a reflection or a response to, social, political and economic processes, where does this leave art history? Contrary to most research in this area, which focuses on the role of collections in building up a material history of a museum or public art gallery, this paper will specifically look at art and cultural spaces without collections. In other words, it treats the institution as a discursive space and claims that the identity of a space is constructed from its exhibition history and display practices as well as from the dialogue and controversy surrounding the staging of those practices. The research will explore exhibition and curatorial practice in Germany, Scandinavia and Switzerland and interrogate the phenomenon of "new institutionalism". Session 14 Museums and the Construction of Art Histories Jennifer King Princeton University Painting and Sculpture at MoMA 1929-1998: Michael Asher's catalogue of deaccessions In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition devoted to the "complex, interdependent, and ever-changing" relationship between living artists and public museums. Entitled "The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect," the exhibition included the work of 60 artists, several of whom were invited to create new works specifically for the exhibition. One of the commissioned artists, Michael Asher, proposed creating a catalog of all the paintings and sculptures deaccessioned by the museum between 1929 and 1998. Not surprisingly, Asher's proposal was met by enormous resistance from the organizing curator and other MoMA officials, for whom such a publication threatened to discourage future gifts of works of art. My paper uses Asher's work as a means of discussing MoMA's powerful role in establishing one of the master narratives of modern art. By providing an inventory of MoMA's deaccessions, Asher's work not only revealed a typically invisible side of the museum's operations, but raised the fraught issue of how the history of art is revised and rethought based on subjective value judgments that often change over time. Unlike the National Gallery of Art in Washington D. C , which has a strict policy prohibiting deaccessions, an institution like MoMA must not only face the matter of what to deaccession, but the consequences (and potential regret) resulting from such decisions. This paper speaks to the ongoing question: who decides what does—and does not— belong in the space of the museum? The Beholder The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe Edited by Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams These ten essays address the experience of art in early modern Europe and approach it from a variety of methodological perspectives. Includes 35 b&w illustrations December 2006. 244 pages Hardback. £55.00. 978-0-7546-0679-6 The Look of Van Dyck The Self-Portrait with a Sunflower and the Vision of the Painter John Peacock Based on a close study of Van Dyck's Self-portrait with a Sunflower, this book examines the picture's context in the symbolic discourses of the period and in the artist's oeuvre. Includes 4 colour and 72 b&w illustrations December 2006. 320 pages Hardback. £60.00. 978-0-7546-0719-9 Sculpture and the Garden Edited by Patrick Eyres a^o Fiona Russell Through a series of case studies exploring the contemporaneous audiences of gardens, the book uncovers the social, political and gendered messages revealed by sculpture's placement and suggests that the garden can itself be read as a sculptural landscape. Includes 85 b&w and 16 colour illustrations October 2006. 196 pages Hardback. £60.00. 978-0-7546-3030-2 www.ashgate.co Painting the Bible Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain Michaela Giebelhausen Painting the Bible analyzes the position of religious painting in academic discourse and assesses the important role Pre-Raphaelite work played in redefining painting for mid-Victorian audiences. Includes 13 colour and 69 b&w illustrations August 2006. 270 pages Hardback. £55.00. 978-0-7546-3074-6 a] Ottoman Women Builders Ottoman Women Builders The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan Lucienne Thys-Senocak Based on archival research and archaeological fieldwork, this study makes original contributions to current debates in the fields of art history, cultural history and gender studies. Includes 104 b&w illustrations February 2007, 346 pages Hardback. £60.00. 978-0-7546-3310-5 Visual Culture and lAxolonisatutn in Britain Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain Edited by Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain provides the first in-depth analysis of the place of visual representations within the process of decolonisation during the period 1945 to 1970. Includes 8 colour and 67 b&w illustrations November 2006. 292 pages Hardback. £55.00. 978-0-7546-4002-8 Rc-mcmbcring Masculinity in Early Modern a] ASHGATE 40 Years of Independent Publishing Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture Allison Levy Merging early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body, this book raises new questions about Renaissance portraiture and re-configures our understanding of masculinity and mourning. Includes 132 b&w illustrations September 2006. 214 pages Hardback. £60.00. 978-0-7546-5404-9 Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe Picturing the Social Margins Edited by Tom Nichols Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe is the first book to focus directly on the visual representation of marginal and outcast people in early modern Europe. Includes 60 b&w illustrations April 2007. 288 pages Hardback. £55.00. 978-0-7546-5557-2 Memory. Masculinity and National Identity i British Visual Cullurr 1914-1930 Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914-1930 A Study of 'Unconquerable Manhood' Gabriel Koureas Concentrating on gender and cultural memory, this study investigates the ways in which masculinities and the web of power relations that they entail worked during the interwar years in order to reconstruct the post-First World War British society. Includes 42 b&w illustrations March 2007. 232 pages Hardback. £55.00. 978-0-7546-6017-0 Jill Carrick, Carleton University, Ottawa Session 15 1968: Activist Art and Its Legacies In French and non-French art-historical accounts of postwar art, "May 1968" has come to function as a charged symbol of the fusion of art and political activism. The takeover of the national French art school in the Spring of 1968 by students and professional artists, and its brief transformation into a "revolutionary workshop" for the production of political posters, has been employed as an occasionally romanticized (if still little-investigated) emblem of art's marriage with contestation. The year 1968 also marked the publication of Art et contestation, a book of essays devoted to French contemporary art and its alleged contestation of establishment culture and social hierarchies. The book was republished the same year in English. May 1968 also witnessed the forced closure of the French National Museum of Modern Art, the occupation of the Latin Quarter, and the flourishing of a variety of ephemeral forms of protest art from graffiti to happenings in the streets. This session investigates how terms such as "1968" and "contestation" have been used as symbols of political involvement and/or "revolutionary" aspiration within the arts. It seeks to question and explore the aims, mythologies, legacies, and geographical and temporal dimensions of activist art during and immediately after the 1960s across a range of international contexts. Steven Harris University of Alberta The Abolition/the Supersession/the Persistence of Art: Late Thoughts on a Debate in and around 1968 One of the most prominent features of May 1968-as was noted by many commentators at the time-was its critique of a separate, autonomous art, which was seen as a symptom of stratified society that must be challenged on all fronts and at all levels. The famous posters of the Ateliers populaires bear a structural relation to such an art in their commitment, their topicality, their public address, their anonymity and their ephemerality; they are both negations of a contemporary art enmeshed in existing systems of commercial and state patronage, and 'the taking of speech' (as it was referred to at the time) from those in power. In this sense, the posters were understood by their makers to be a form of popular culture, as opposed to a professionalized, hierarchical art made for an elite. In the effervescence of May, numerous art critics and curators as well as artists called for the abolition or supersession of art. This paper will examine the arguments for such positions put forward by critics like Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Clarence Lambert in and around 1968, as well as the trenchant criticisms of their views made by the sculptor and writer Pol Bury. It will also discuss the posters made by Asger Jorn in response to those produced in the Ateliers populaires, as a form of sympathetic critique which nevertheless formulates important differences. Two issues will be linked in this paper: the issue of who speaks; and the critique or the defence of aesthetics undertaken by those involved in the debate over the abolition, the supersession, or the persistence of art. Fabien Danesi Mai 1968 In May 1968, the student rebellion proclaimed its desire for autonomy and asserted the necessity of deep social and cultural changes. While this contestation was essentially influenced by the Vietnam war and Maoist China, the International Situationist also played a role. Although its radical theories were not used literally, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism were evident in this movement. The IS participated in the days of fighting, intervening not in the Odeon Theater (despite its links with the art world), but in the Sorbonne University. The reason for this is that the revolutionary group wanted to go beyond the creation of works towards a praxis whose ambition was the complete transformation of life. This paper proposes to study the Situationist position during the "events" of May 1968 and to compare it to other positions held by G.R.A.V. or "L'Atelier Populaire des Beaux-Arts". This analysis will underline the specificity of the I.S., emphasizing its dream (as noted by Lautreamont) of a daily poetry made by all. Elodie Antoine Frangois Rabelais University After May '68: Contestation in Artists' Texts. During the years following the the Events of May '68, over ten artistic groups and specialized magazines appeared in France. Several of these magazines were created by the artists themselves. A new generation of artists, some of whom had participated in the May rebellion, denounced aspects of historical and social contemporary reality such as the Vietnam War, power relations, and difficult working conditions. In addition to their visual practice, they produced militant political handouts and theoretical texts published in magazines. These texts were very important during the period of 1969-1972. They testify to a profound desire for change in the social as well as artistic realm. Criticism of the bourgeoisie is reiterated within them, as is the artists' marxist and leninist defense of the class struggle. This paper defines the different theoretical and political positions of the artists, and highlights their differences in order to interrogate the significance of their political texts following May '68. Victoria Scott Binghamton University Expressionism and the Posters of May 1968 The thesis of this paper is that the distinctly handmade look of French political posters produced during May and June of 1968 was not the result of the spontaneous "capture of speech", as is widely held, but that the artists, workers, and students, who designed the posters adopted an improvised and purposefully naff aesthetic in order to challenge the rise of industrially produced imagery, specfficalfy television. In 1964 Barthes identified a veritable 'panic' concerning the place of the image in French society and connected it to the advance of the new medium of television. This paper will take up the ways in which this panic crystallized during the general strike of 1968 through an exploration of the parameters of visual production and reception during the revolutionary situation. By focusing on the material specificity of the images in question, from silk-screens to the illustrated press and television screens, the essay will tackle the suppression and circulation of images throughout the events, and explore the notion that the posters provided an alternative source of visual information. The conclusion will argue that the makeshift aesthetic of the posters constituted a form of anachronistic expressionism which was taken up strictly for practical and ideological reasons, and that concerns about the modes of representation in 1968 were more central than has been previously recognized. _94 Session 15 1968: Activist Art and Its Legacies Hannah Feldman Northwestern University Making Politics, Siting Culture In reconsidering and, to some degree, reconstructing the effects of the student and worker strikes and sit-ins in Paris during May and June of 1968, recent scholarship has now come to deride the possibility that '68 actually marked a fusion of art and political activism. In fact, instead of marking a spontaneous moment where the spheres of culture and politics -aesthetic representation and representation as the right of the political subject—might have merged, 1968 is now mobilized as proof of their incommensurability. To some degree, such a project relies, somewhat ironically, on what is arguably the most significant pictorial legacy of 1968: the posters produced by Beaux-Arts students in the Atelier populaire. Following the rhetoric of the students who produced these posters, they are described as demonstrating the artists' renunciation of the continued production of art as art (irreal) or art as commodity in favor of an art transformed from art and into militant advocacy and thereby inscribed in the service of the (real) revolution. Art and action thus separated, the posters become available to the realm of the political, leaving art a remainder to be resumed after the revolution. Such considerations, however, derive from a historical gerrymandering that has already partitioned cultural practice from the real it might represent, thereby isolating invention from contestation, making from acting. In order to challenge this policed definition of cultural practice, and so too to better understand the legacy of what actually happened in or was actually made by 1968, we need to expand our conceptualizations of both culture and politics, especially as each was being rethought during the period in relation to the radical struggle for visibility that had motivated the tactics of the struggle for decolonization in the years just prior. With a particular focus on the contemporaneous writings of figures including Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucautt, and those associated with the 1968 publication Art et contestation, as well as artistic research conducted subsequently by figures like Daniel Buren, Chris Marker, Dennis Adams, and Jean-Luc Moulene, this paper considers the site of cultural production as articulated not by artists choosing to "work" over "making," but by workers who chose to "make" or by colonial subjects who chose to "act" in the name of culture. The legacy of 1968 and the history of decolonization that fed it, I propose, lies in this instruction to make politics visible and site culture as action. Fabienne Dumont A Case of Blindness in Art History: The Legacy of Seventies Feminism in France Evoking art and feminism in France in the 1970s brings to mind a very short list of names (Annette Messager, Orlan, Niki de Saint Phalle or Gina Pane), ignoring most of the other artists working in a feminist way or influenced by the social movement active at that time, itself bom in the wake of May 1968. One can also wonder about the indifference/blindness to the feminist movement in art, which gathered hundreds of women. These women were involved to various degrees in the 8 most important artistic groups ; groups which were parallel to the political movement. This is a common case of amnesia in History. My PhD thesis focused on these women artists, their protest and their legacy. I am using some of my PhD research results to awswer the question of the legacy of the protest in art. I will base my analysis on openly feminist artistic work, in particular those carried out with new media (videos, performances) as well as the work of artist who benefit from this opening climate and revalorization of techniques culturally reserved to women. These techniques were then mixed with more traditional ones like painting, drawing or sculpture (work of wire in particular). We will look at the place these works occupied on the artistic scene. We will pay particular attention to their relationship with feminist ideas conveyed by political groups. The ambiguous position of artists themselves concerning feminism make the legacy unclear and not very valuable. Brandon Taylor University of Southampton Absurd Lines, Protest Walks 1968: Activist Act and its Legacies. The vogue for walking among members of the 1960s international avant-garde presents the possibility of a relationship of some kind to other ways of marking the landscape that were current in that decade, from peace marches and tourism to the building of motorway systems. The present paper examines the claims of Richard Long's student work, from 1964 to 1968, to participate in the spirit of protest that animated the counter-culture during those years. Though Long has tended to read his walks, stone lines and map pieces as 'sculpture' out-of-doors, we prefer to say that the main source of his irony and rebellion lay not in the landscape itself but in the ways in which he enjoyed the absurdity of walking for the sake of it, and for unseating the ontological security of the artwork through the use of photographs and text. His disingenuousness needs some explaining. Nicholas Cullinan Tate Modern/Courtauld Institute The Aesthetics of Politics: Arte Povera and 1968 in Italy Most analysis of 1968 has focused exclusively on France, ignoring the more sustained impact the events had in Italy. This paper will explore the revolutionary ideals of Arte Povera, as codified by Germano Celant's manifesto "Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War", which sought to counter American hegemony by linking the Italian artists' aesthetic strategies to the military tactics of the guerilla soldiers of Vietnam. As we shall see, the polemics of 1968 upended the politicised aesthetic concerns of Arte Povera, culminating in the disruption to the Milan Triemate and the Venice Biennale that year, at which many of these artists exhibited. Their disavowal of the students' cause will be contextualised with the response from figures such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, who published a famous poem castigating the students as "spoilt rich brats". The legacy of 1968 in Italy will also be considered, prefiguring, as it did, the mass workers' strikes of the "autunno caldo" in 1969, the beginnings of left-wing terrorism with the Brigate Rosse, and the radical reformulation of Marxism developed by now well-know theorists such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, in response to this crisis. Transposing the terms of Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics, this paper will address the way the events of 1968 interrupted and usurped the politicised aesthetics of Arte Povera. Gillian Whiteley Loughborough University School of Art and Design Situating the insurgent imagination: Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture and British counterculture! practice 'We are inventing a new and original world. Imagination has seized power'. In the June 1968 preface to the second edition of his book, Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall identifies with this slogan scrawled on the doors of the Sorbonne in the May riots, arguing that art had never been closer to its 'violent and orgiastic roots'. For him, the root of political development was 'creative and irrational'. His idiosyncratic and semi-auto-biographical account remains a key primary source which chronicles the emergence of international counter-culture in the 1960s. It provides plenty of evidence that models for 'activist art' and cultural practice in Britain were well established before 1968 and, indeed, were in a long line of politically engaged art. Written in 1967, a year of mounting protest against the Vietnam War, and first published in 1968, Bomb Culture consolidated his role as a major spokesperson and commentator on the era, was immediately translated and published in various languages and quickly became a 'handbook' for activists, one reviewer describing it as 'the Underground's epitaph by one who was in at its birth'. By the mid 60s, Nuttall was a pivotal figure on the British countercultural scene with a prolific output, creating and staging happenings, performing poetry in public parks, writing graphic novels, drawing posters, planning and organising cultural events, bringing together artists, poets and like-minded 'subversive' thinkers, producing small journals and pamphlets. He played a key role within the international 'underground' press and literary scene, exchanging writings and ideas with fellow thinkers such as the Situationists in the United States and Europe - including William Burroughs, Carl Weissner, Alexander Trocchi, Bob Cobbing and Dom Sylvester Houedard ­initiating small journals such as the cut-up My Own Mag. Nuttall was associate editor of Moving Times and regularly did cartoons for International Times. In 1966, Nuttall founded the People Show, an eclectic group of artists and performers which took live acts and improvisational interventions onto the streets, into telephone boxes and public toilets. Drawing on the writings of Jacques Ranciere on the politics of aesthetics and utilising primary research (including the archives of Jeff Nuttall and Adrian Henri) this paper will address the politics of the 'insurgent imagination'. In particular, it will aim to situate Nuttall's contribution to the creation and dissolution of the 'myth' of 1968, through an exploration of particular cultural, gendered and revolutionary aspects of his work alongside a range of related countercultural activities and artistic practices in Sixties' Britain. Antigoni Memou Courtauld Institute of Art The Student Movement of May 1968: Activist Photography, Serf-Reflection and Antinomies This paper discusses the photographic representation of the French movement in the students' newspapers that were published and disseminated during the events of May 1968.The discussion draws upon unpublished material extracted from The Bibioteque d' Histoire Sociale Du XXe Siecle (Universite Paris I- Pantheon Sorbonne), and more specifically, the newspapers Avant Garde Jeunesse, Lutte Socialiste, Servir Le Peuple and Barricades. The paper argues that the imagery that dominated these publications focused on young students' protests, occupations of the universities, as well as their conflicts with the police. This imagery reflected the students' critique of the modern commodity culture, the traditional organizational forms of the labor movement, the bureaucratic and hierarchic university structures, and the authoritarian nature of the State. This dominant imagery revealed the contradictions, failings and antinomies of the movement as well. These photographs reproduced stereotypical ideas about revolutionary thought and practice, such as the perception of the revolution being just an event, a moment of conflict to seize the power and not a process or continuous struggle. Furthermore, the paper stresses that the absence of imagery that portrays workers striking and occupying factories -which were available in the trade union publications-reveals the failure of the student movement to connect with the workers' movement. Thus, the use of these photographs represented the contradictory character of the movement, which was a moment of both insubordination and subordination to the reified relations of capital. Session 15 1968: Activist Art and Its Legacies Johanne Sloan Concordia University Counter-cultural War Machines in Montreal, circa 1968 If many art practices of the sixties recognized the seductive allure of American commercial imagery, two exemplary artworks, shown in Montreal in 1967 and 1968, sought to channel the very energy of pop culture into countercultural, socially transformative projects. Greg Curnoe's Homage to the R-34 (1968) was a commissioned mural for the airport, depicting the artist's friends and family under threat from an old-fashioned airship, with contemporary figures such as Mohammed Ali and Lyndon Johnson as part of the scenario. The mural was immediately and officially censored for its anti-war stance and anti-americanism, although the artwork clearly mimicked the punchy visual appeal of American pop culture. The previous year, in the Youth Pavilion at Expo 67 (the world's fair held in Montreal), Marc-Antoine Nadeau and Andre Montpetit exhibited a sculptural installation, Le sous-marin jaune de la force de frappe quebecoise, that was part of the "Ti-pop" phenomenon in Quebec. Ti-pop was the embrace of hybrid cultural products, whereby parochial signifiers of French-Canadian identity could be infused with a brash Pop Art attitude, to thereby forge a new Quebecois identity. On the "yellow submarine" in question, the rosaries and pietas which had until recently held sway amongst French-Canadians had become kitsch, certain to be sloughed off as this atomic-powered pop-cultural vehicle moved into the future with the youth of Quebec aboard. Appropriating aspects of pop culture as well as an iconography of war (military airship and submarine), these distinctive fusions of art and countercultural values in Montreal should be considered as part of a widespread commitment to reinvent "political art" circa 1968, by French, Spanish, British, as well as American artists. Adriana Kiss-Davies University of Wales Aberystwyth Memories of a Crushed Revolution: Josef Koudelka's photographs of the 1968 Prague Invasion 1968 was a significant year in the history of communist Czechoslovakia. The short-lived optimism and euphoria of the Prague Spring was brutally crushed by Soviet military force in August 1968. Josef Koudelka, a young photographer at the time recorded the events with accuracy, emotions and eloquence. These photos of the Prague Invasion became renowned after appearing anonymously in newspapers and magazine covers all over the world. The mysterious identity of the "Prague Photographer" helped to cerate a sense of secrecy and myth around the images and their creator. Looking through these pictures, it becomes apparent that they are more than just personal recollections. Koudleka's photographs not only capture the intense drama of a small nation's fight against the overpowering aggressors but - due to their timeless artistic quality - they symbolise the agony of modern history and society which peaked in the turmoil of various events in 1968. In my paper I will examine the circumstances in which these images were created together with their effect on the development of photojournalism and Koudelka's artistic career. The significance of these photos is profound and multifaceted: they can be evaluated as historical documents, or looked upon as a unique artistic diary, but at the same time convey a strong political message and contribute towards the on-going discussion on art, politics and propaganda. The main appeal of the Prague 1968 photographs lies in their sincerity and dramatic power - and their continuous influence on and relevance to contemporary society and photography cannot be doubted. Anna Green, University of East Anglia Norwich School of Art and Design Vivien Northcote, Independent Scholar Session 16 Contesting Childhood Childhood Studies is by now well established in Sociology, History and Literature, In Art History, however, the field remains contested. Art Historians were slow to respond to Aries' Centuries of Childhood (1960), the first book of any weight on the subject - although forays were made, particularly, into eighteenth-century British art. In more recent years there has been some recognition of the serious potential of the field. Anne Higonnet's Pictures of Innocence (1998) was pathbreaking, if problematic, in the questions it asked of images of children from Reynolds to contemporary American photography. Then came Picturing Children: Constructions of Children between Rousseau and Freud (2002), an anthology of essays about literary and visual texts, edited by Marilyn Brown. Neither publication was received without protest. Whilst earlier dissentors had contested the area as unworthy of serious academic attention, later objections were to its possible 'impropriety'. Thus, even in our state of postmodern pluralism, there is a last bastion resistant to relativism: the desirability of an untouchable status for childhood. Contradictorily, perhaps, an anxiety in academia, as in life, that childhood is currently compromised, and even that it is 'dead', further inflects the discourse. Art History and Visual Studies are particularly well placed to enter these debates, which so frequently focus upon the image of childhood. The weight and variety of papers in this session emphatically refute the notion that to explore childhood and adolescence is a fundamentally sentimental and unintellectual endeavour, and interrogate the idea that to do so is morally suspect. Jeannie Labno University of Sussex Visual Representation of Children on Funeral Monuments in Poland (1500-1650) There is a general consensus that, prior to the seventeenth century, child-only funeral monuments were uncommon and without distinctive iconography: children were depicted as either swaddled or presented as small adults. Yet, in Poland there was a tradition of commemorating children, which dates back to at least the early sixteenth century; these monuments were designed for, and dedicated to, individual children. Furthermore, and unusually, daughters were commemorated as well as sons. In addition, a large subset of these monuments illustrate a single iconographic type: they show the child as a reclining putto, a type which evolved into the reclining putto and skull. Although this motif later became popular throughout Europe as a memento mori, only in Poland was it adapted to represent a particular, named child. Such a motif is particularly suitable for young children—especially infants too young to stand or walk—and suggests an appreciation of the physical body of the young child. The adoption and adaptation of this motif allows the resolution of a fundamental problem with child monuments: namely, the challenge of preserving the social body in cases where the deceased is too young to have fulfilled their social role. Under the impact of the Counter-Reformation, changes occurred in both the figurative presentation and the gender indication of Polish child monuments. This paper will consider the various ways that the child is visually represented on Polish funeral monuments during this period of fundamental political and religious changes. Emma Barker The Open University Greuze and the 'Invention of Childhood' Jean-Baptiste Greuze's painting, A Child Playing with a Dog, was one of the most admired exhibits in the Paris Salon of 1769. In the way that it aligns a female child with the realm of nature, this work prefigures more familiar images of childhood of the later eighteenth century, such as Reynolds's portraits of little girls. To date, however, Greuze's paintings of children have largely escaped the attention of the scholars who have analysed such images in terms of the invention of the modern conception of childhood, which is widely thought to date from this period. The reasons for this neglect lie, at least in part, in the artist's dubious reputation as a purveyer of eroticized images of young girls, which has tarred all his single female figures by association. In this paper, I shall explore the full range of Greuze's depictions of children, taking account both of the single figure works and of the children who appear in his larger compositions. In so doing, I shall argue that, whilst these works undoubtedly do offer a vision of childhood innocence that is charged with erotic interest, they also need to be understood in terms of contemporary concerns about the vulnerability of young children outside the secure context of the family. An exemplary work in this respect is Greuze's Lady of Charity (1775), in which a wealthy little girl is contrasted with a poor young boy, who is forced to work for a living. Philippa Kaina University College London Insubordinate Bodies: Edgar Degas and the Formation of a Modern Adolescent Subject Edgar Degas' Young Spartans Exercising was begun in 1860. The painting was never shown to the public during the artist's lifetime, but remained in the studio where it was reworked intermittently by the artist. During this period the canvas underwent drastic changes. As the classical profiles of the figures reminiscent of the Greek ephebe were progressively effaced in favour of the blunted facial features characteristic of a specifically 'modern' physiognomic, the Young Spartans can here be seen to function as the site through which Degas was able to re-imagine adolescence and update it in relation to his contemporary context. The paper will then discuss a number of works exhibited in 1881 upon the theme of adolescence, in particular two court portraits of Emile Abadie and Paul Knobloch - two youths standing trail for a series of brutal murders recently committed in Paris. Entitled Criminal Physiognomies these works make the explicit association between adolescence and criminality and in doing so tap into a set of contemporary anxieties regarding juvenile delinquency and the degeneracy of contemporary youth. Considering these works in relation to the emergence of a new social discourse upon the adolescent in France the paper will demonstrate how the notion of the adolescent as a subversive and insubordinate figure is indicative of pervasive unease regarding adolescence as an 'in-between' state. And whilst the adolescent is subsequently accorded only a marginal status within the body politic, I argue that it is precisely the refusal of this figure to fall in line with dominant narratives wherein lies its disruptive and transgressfve potential. _100 Session 16 Contesting Childhood Pamela Gerrish Nunn University of Canterbury, New Zealand I read therefore I am This paper examines thel 872 canvas by Victorian painter Sophie Anderson, The Children's Storybook, for its meanings in a period in which images of children were prolific - a sure crowd-pleaser, in fine art this genre attracted many artists of varying calibre. Anderson, a regular and successful painter of children, worked in an age when canvases were 'read' like visual fictions and when a female artist was identified by the markers of gender which her personal life exhibited ­daughter, wife, mother, beauty, ingenue - as much as by her pictorial output. Thus a work like this was judged through its author being appraised for having the 'right' things to say about childhood. Where many more works - including Anderson's more usual works - offer the child up to the adult gaze, pretty, needy, amusing, cheeky or erotic, the young readers of the Storybook are absorbed in their own activities, indifferent to the onlooker, depicted as whole people who exist within their own peer group. In annexing the contemporary issue of education through its most obvious emblem, reading, The Children's Storybook offers a pictorial recognition of the power of the text and the potential of readership to forge the child's selfhood. Mike O'Mahony University of Bristol Fatherless Children: Redefining Social Relations in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Great Patriotic War The representation of children was a dominant theme in official Soviet art. Throughout the inter-war years, such representations stood metaphorically for the emergence of a new type of citizen transformed both morally and physically by the ideological drive towards communism. This heroic image of childhood was encapsulated in the myth of Pavlik Morozov, the fourteen-year-old boy murdered after informing on his own father. The mythology surrounding Morozov's 'martyrdom' spawned a host of cultural representations in literature, music, film (Eisenstein's Bezhin Meadow), painting and sculpture. After 1945, however, this genre was dramatically transformed as Soviet society strove to come to terms with the impact of the Second World War and the rise of the Cold War. Specialists in the representation of children, such as the painter Fedor Reshetnikov, have been widely ignored in both the former Soviet Union and the West, the so-called sentimentalising nature of their works dismissed as populist and intellectually unchallenging. I would argue, however, that such works raise key questions about the nature of late Stalinist society. This paper will examine Reshetnikov's paintings in three key contexts: The changed gender and familial relationship generated by the significant growth in the number of fatherless children as a result of the disruption to the conventional nuclear family caused by war losses. The metaphorical status of Stalin as a surrogate father to inspire and educate the younger generation. The emergence of a rebellious youth subculture first identified by the official Soviet press in the late 1940s. Vicki Carruthers University of Essex 'Potency, Power and Unlimited Imagination: Encountering Childhood in the Early Works of Dorothea Tanning Throughout her long career, Dorothea Tanning used notions of fluidity and flux to explore the reconciliation of disparate subjective, embodied realities. In the early part of her career, she chose the experience of childhood and adolescence to best signify 'the limitless potential of possibilities' in-between multiple realities: the young girl, in particular, is a symbol of potent, transformative power. The transition from childhood to adolescence is portrayed as a journey of hybridity, fluidity and risk. Tanning chose to examine the psychological, sexual and imaginative aspects of female childhood subjectivity whilst also introducing aspects of violence, isolation and anxiety often experienced with the unfurling of adolescence. The enigmatic Eine, Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) is an example of supernatural forces present within the imaginative drama of childhood. Tanning states that 'in childhood there is a primitive.. .acceptance of a.. .sensorial world, one in which powerful forces Inhabit the eerie landscapes of.. .the imagination in which the extraordinary can exist unhampered by disbelief or logic' In this and other works, Tanning uses her lifelong obsession with the psycho-drama of gothic, horror and fairy tale fiction to construct a landscape in which children inhabit darkened interiors that are charged with a mood of supernatural or psychological menace or joy. The way in which Tanning explores and presents childhood is unusual and rare, both historically and in contemporary art. Her work continues to attract critical attention yet remains ambiguous, arguably because we continue to marginalise, pathctogise or sentimentalise the experience of childhood. This paper will explore the above theoretically, using excerpts from recent interviews with the artist. Harriet Riches Middlesex University Practicing Space: Adolescence and Photography in the Interior This paper considers the how childhood memory is evoked through the bodily exploration of photographic space, concentrating on recent practices using photography as the medium for the performance of adolescent subjectivities. Looking at, for example, Francesca Woodman's 'self-portraits' from the 1970s in which she repeatedly imaged herself in decrepit settings dressed-up in girlish costume, and Lucy Gunning's more recent 1993 film Climbing Around My Room, this paper considers the relationship between adolescent serf-construction, space and the act of photographic representation. These aspects have often been overlooked, used either to support a critical collapse of the roles of young woman and artistic producer, or dismissed as evidence of artistic immaturity. This paper aims to redress these oversights, suggesting that the contrivance of such identities is central to the work's meaning. While they relate to contemporary imagery of the adolescent body, and also recall 19th century practices such as Clementina Hawarden's capturing of female adolescence within domestic spaces, what distinguishes my case studies is their representation of moving bodies within interiors - as blurred or climbing bodies exploring photographed space. Making use of Michel de Certeau's tactic of 'practicing space', I suggest that the performance of the artist's body in the fragment of the still photograph, or throughout the extended moment of the film, activates a passage that recovers an aspect of childhood experience, one repeated throughout life - as if remembering an originary childhood spatial experience of separation through the body, via a parallel rehearsal of the photographic process of becoming 'other'. Susanne Stich University of Ulster 'Which Role Does Time Play When We are Talking about Identity?': Narrative and Late Childhood in the work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila This paper forms part of a practice-based PhD research project entitled "Visibilities of Childhood Experience in Moving Image". It explores the representation of late childhood/early adolescence in the cinema versions of If 6 was 9 (1995) and Today (1996/97) by Finnish film artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila(*1959), discussing the visualization of imagination, memory and time as well as narrative approach. Imagining the future informs childhood while engaging with childhood memories informs adulthood. The act of securing a sense of self, to some extent, involves both frames of mind, which, in reality, cannot be experienced simultaneously. Ahtilas representations oppose this premise. Her characters look like children, yet through monologues and narrative detail one gets an insight into their consciousness where their sense of serf in relation to time is blurred, calling into question their imagination and, on another level, their physical existence in the perceptual presence. These ambiguous children, quoting Emma Wilson, "strategically deny (...) the distinct division between adults and children" (Screen 46; 331) and imply a certain co-existence of childhood and adulthood, the key interest of this paper. Importantly though, the adult perspective is not understood as the dominant one as Ahtila's films establish a kind of common ground between adults and children, which enables them to re-negotiate their roles. This approach values the important and often neglected idea of children's agency as emphasised by Karen Lury: "[Children] want and they act, and (...) should therefore be understood as agents as well as subjects."(Screen 46; 308) Session 16 Contesting Childhood Catherine Grant Courtauld Institute of Art More than a Schoolgirl Crush: Amy Adler and the Adolescent Fan A schoolgirl crush: a mixture of desire, identification and aggression, played out in fantasy. A combination of narcissistic, heterosexual and homosexual desire, the intense identification with the object of desire undoes the paradigms of 'mature' heterosexuality. In the work of American artist Amy Adler, this adolescent position is appropriated and reworked in her hybrid photographed drawings. Depicting a range of adolescent and child characters, including the artist as a young woman, Adler's portraits explore the ways in which identity is filtered through celebrity culture, with her own images becoming part of a seductive, androgynous cast that include a young River Phoenix and a series of unnamed, nubile female stars taken from magazines, billboards and CD covers. In this work Adler enacts the adolescent fan copying a photograph of his or her idol as perfectly as possible, an act of ownership that inscribes the fan's desire into the image. However, as Adler re-enacts this process, she maintains a distance, the adult performing the adolescent who attempts to possess or perhaps become the object of desire through the act of drawing. This paper explores the potential of the adolescent position for thinking through modes of desiring and identification that are often dismissed as 'immature' or 'feminine', undermining the stability of binary definitions of both sexuality and gender. In thinking through the aggression and seduction presented in Adler's work, the adolescent fan provides a structure for thinking about female desire that allows it to be more than a schoolgirl crush. Outi Remes Birkbeck College London Representing Unborn Children: Reappearances of Aborted Children in the work of Tracey Emin Aborted and unborn children are a taboo in our society and they are rarely represented or discussed in the context of art history. The paper addresses the originality of the topic in relation to the work of the British artist Tracey Emin. Emin is notorious for her autobiographical installations such as the tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 (1995) and My Bed (1997). In addition, she has created a series of work that deals with her relationship to her unborn children that she lost in two abortions, carried out in 1990 and 1992. Years after, her unborn children continue to reappear as a source of artistic inspiration in the works such as Gin bath, bed and Moses basket (2002) and Conversation with My Mum (2001). In reference to current politics and the artists such as Frida Kahlo, this paper looks at Emin's attempt to find a new language of visual representation for something that does not exist in art history. Aso, it suggests that Emin's work has social implications. In politics, the rights of unborn children continue to be a heated topic. Exceptionally, Emin's work takes neither a traditional pro-choice nor a pro-life position and breaks the silent tradition of not representing and speaking of unborn and aborted children. AAH Annual Si THE EDWIN MELLEN PRESS AN INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHER OF SCHOLARLY RESEARCH Mellen House Unit 17 Llambed Business Park Lampeter, Ceredigion SA48 8LT Wales. UK Conference 12th - 14th April 2007 Please visit our stand at the Booktair situated in the main foyer of the campus lona Williams. Director, invites you to propose your next scholarly book The Edwin Mellen Press contracts for manuscripts Py editorial review of a simple proposal, even when a Pook remains in the writing process. Conference catalogues available and huge discounts on all titles to conference delegates on our stand Tel: +44 1570 423 356 For a complete list of titles and reviews, click Fax: +44 1570 423 775 www.mellenpress.com _104 J 05 Gail Day, School of Fine of Fine Art History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds Steve Edwards, Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Open University Andrew Hemingway, Department of History of Art, University College, London Session 17 History and Class Consciousness and Art History Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness (1923) is one of the intellectual landmarks of the twentieth century and a foundational text of Western Marxism. More than any other single work, it brought out the philosophical complexity of the Marxist heritage and offered resources for critiquing the impoverished and positivistic Marxisms of the Second and Third Internationals. It is symptomatic that in his accommodation with the official communist movement Lukacs was forced to renounce his most important philosophical work and that of all his writings it had most influence among his successors working for a critical reconstruction of Marxism, from the Frankfurt School to Guy Debord and beyond. It is also indicative of the book's revolutionary elan that it was first published in Malik Verlag's 'Little Revolutionary Library' with a cover design by John Heartfield. The Budapest Sunday Circle, in which Lukacs was the leading light, included figures who would go on to make major contributions to art history, namely Frederick Antal, Charles de Tolnay, Arnold Hauser, and Johannes Wilde, as well as the film theorist Bela Balazs. Although some of the book's key concepts such as 'totality', 'mediation' and 'ascribed class consciousness' were heavily criticized in the 1970s, others (and notably 'reification') continue to have widespread currency. The recent publication in English translation of Lukacs's defence of History and Class Consciousness, Tailism and the Dialectic of 1925-6 (Verso, 2000), makes this a particularly apposite moment to reassess the significance of his early Marxism for art history, both historical and contemporary. Martin Gaughan Independent Scholar Berlin Dada: Transforming the Subject/Object Mere coincidence, but the Berlin publishing house, Der Malik Verlag, was the site for two apparently incompatible types of publication. Its proprietor, the Dada poet and member of the recently formed German Communist Party (KPD), Wieland Herzfelde, published Berlin Dada journals between 1919 and 1921, and, in 1923, the first edition of Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness. Central to both programmes was the motivating force of the recent revolutions: the Bolshevik (1917) and the German November (1918), and the role of proletarian consciousness in challenging bourgeois cultural hegemony. Whether either party, Dadaists or Lukacs, was aware of each other is not known, and the very different cultural responses they were proposing to the revolutionary moment would be seen to be antagonistic: the Dadaists were already being heavily criticised in the official party newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, since 1919, on grounds similar to those being advanced by Lukacs in essays and reviews he was writing for the paper in 1922. These latter introduce elements which would be further elaborated in History and Class Consciousness (1923): the compelling contribution of culture and consciousness to praxis, and more generally the concept of 'totality' and the practice of mediation. Although Lukacs would exclude modernist practices on the grounds that their preoccupation with the fragmentary, of necessity, excluded an engagement with totality it will be proposed here that the important Lukacsian concepts can be employed in the case of Berlin Dada works with outcomes comparable to his claims for more traditional forms. In developing the argument consideration will also be given to the works of Benjamin and Brecht, whose espousal of Dada practice and principle (montage) broadens the scope for the deployment of Lukacs's ideas. Michael Orwicz University of Connecticut at Storrs Lukacs in the 70s: Art History and the New Left My paper will look at how Lukacs's 'History and Class Consciousness' was taken up by New Left intellectuals in the US in the wake of its English publication in 1971. I'll consider how Lukacs's central categories (rerfication, commodity and false consciousness) were interpreted, incorporated into -and challenged by- New Left theorists in critically reshaping Old Left class politics. I'll investigate three areas in which Lukacs's writing played a role : the New Left's focus on indwidual subjectivity generated through consumption; how 'false consciousness' changed to 'ideology critique'; and the question of agency in light of the New Left's strident critique of Lukacsian 'totality'. Marxist art history in the 70's will, of course, be one of my focal points in developing these ideas (e.g., Clark, DuncarVWallach, Jameson, Jay, Werckmeister, & Co.). Alex Potts University of Michigan Against Misunderstood Realism: Lukacs's Dialectics and Postwar Artistic Culture I shall be examining the critique of modernism or avant-gardism, and the arguments for a critical realist alternative, that Lukacs put forward in The Contemporary Meaning of Critical Realism, a book he sketched out in 1955, and published in West Germany under the title Against misunderstood realism shortly after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, in which he took an active part. My aim is to explore the deeply invested political perspective Lukacs brought to bear analyzing contemporary literature and modem culture generally, at a moment that was witnessing a breakdown in the attitudes and political and ethical commitments that had established themselves in the communist East and capitalist West in the immediate postwar period. Two issues where Lukacs's Marxist analysis converges with attitudes emerging in the Western art world at the time are particularly worth considering - his critique of postwar modernism's hypostatizing of angst and of the cult of a formalist tabula rasa as becoming increasingly detached from reality in the new social and political situation emerging in the early and mid-1950s, and his case for critical realism as a compelling alternative - bearing in mind that his call for an art that connected with the realist tradition of 19th European literature was very different from the anti-formalist engagement with modern 'life' or 'reality' in experimental art of the period. Also pertinent is his critique of the schematic and empty forms of orthodox socialist realism, that could be seen to echo features of contemporary Western social realism. Session 17 History and Class Consciousness and Art History Alistair Rider University of York Alienation and Artistic Labour This paper takes Alex Potts' essay 'Dolls and Things' (1994) as an opportunity to reconsider how Lukacs' theory of reification might be best deployed for a critical history of artistic production. In his essay, Potts explores how the contradictory status of modern sculpture relates to questions pertaining to the more generic formation of commodities within a capitalist society. By citing passages from Baudelaire and Rilke, Potts shows how sculpture is often presented as hovering uneasily between the status of a highly charged object of fantasy and a mere physical thing - a tension that is seen as symptomatic of the way 'the object' is capable of being conceptualised within a reified society. Potts' narrative shares a number of characteristics with other cultural histories of the physical object world that are guided by Lukacs' account of reification. But such accounts do raise a serious question. Is it meaningful to evoke reification (as a generalisation of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism) without maintaining a clear sense of the distinction between abstract and concrete labour on which the theory surely depends? This paper returns to History and Class Consciousness in search of answers. I take my lead from Gillian Rose, who suggests that we should attend more closely to the way in which Lukacs emphasises that the commodity form is underwritten primarily by legal dichotomies ­reification and personification - and that it is these forms together that perpetuate and obscure further inequalities. As a means of reorienting an account of reification in this direction, I shall discuss some of the complexities and issues that the sculptors Carl Andre and Richard Serra faced in the mid 1970s when they attempted to define their work in relation to a description of the capital/wage-labour relation. Blake Stimson University of California at Davis Guilt as Form This presentation will center on Lukacs's account of the "imputed" character of class consciousness, or the "distance that separates class consciousness from the empirically given, and from the psychologically describable and explicable ideas which men form about their situation in life." (HCC 51) Class consciousness for Lukacs, like its unconscious other, was itself a form of alienation or lived abstraction at a remove from both embodied experience and conceptual understanding. Such alienation is manifest differently for different classes—in dehumanizing reification, for example, or super-humanizing entitlement, or in the philosophical contortions of dialectical understanding. The central question to be considered is how that remove from concrete experience and conceptual understanding has historically registered in the perceptual, affective, and aesthetic contortions of modern art and, by extension, in art historical appreciation. Put more bluntly, the question that Lukacs will be understood to have posed to art history will be one about its own peculiar form of alienation. At issue will be the unique form of experience heralded under the philosophical banner of the aesthetic—"Artworks are, a priori, socially culpable," is how Lukacs's heir Adomo described that form, adding that "each one that deserves its name seeks to expiate this guilt." (AT 234) The particular trajectory from History and Class Consciousness to art history investigated, thus, will be one marked mostly by loss—not so much of Lukacs's powerful Marxism or even his deep and capacious philosophical understanding more generally but loss instead of the opening he provided for aesthetic engagement. Collective Inventions constitutes the first collection and book-length publication on Surrealism in Belgium on which Belgian and Anglo-American scholars have collaborated. Collective Inventions offers new writings by leading international scholars and experts on the movement's diverse manifestations in Belgium. The essays range from comparative analyses of Surrealism in Belgium with other versions of Surrealism, particularly French, to detailed critical engagements with individual oeuvres. The authors use contemporary theoretical and critical models to explore artistic production in a variety of media, including painting and photography, film and fashion, postcards and Perspex. Collective Inventions significantly alters and widens current understandings of Surrealism. Collective Inventions: SURREALISM IN BELGIUM Patricia Allmer and Hilde Van Gelder (eds) Patricia Allmer (Manchester Metropolitan University) Jan Dirk Baetens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) David Bate (University of Westminster) Georgiana Colvile (former Universite de Tours) Liesbeth Decan (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) Steven Harris (University of Alberta, Edmonton) Silvano Levy (Keele University) Neil Matheson (University of Westminster) An Paenhuysen (University of California, Berkeley) Ben Stoltzfus (University of California, Riverside) Hilde Van Gelder (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) LI EVEN GEVAERT SERIES VOLUM E 5 Series editors: Previous Volumes: Barbara Bacrt Jan Baetens Hilde Van Gelder Assistant editor: Jan Dirk Baetens Managing editor: Rein Desle Volum e 1: Els Vanden Meersch. Paranoid(2004) Volum e 2: Hilde Van Gelder (ed.) Constantin Meunier. A Dialogue with Allan Sekula Obstructions (2005) Volum e 3: Hilde Van Gelder (ed.) In the Name of Mozart. Photographs by Maiou Swinnen (2006) Volum e 4: Jan Baetens and Hilde Va n Gelder (eds) Critical Realism in Contemporary Art. Around Allan Sekulas Photography (2006) Named after the pioneer of the photography industry in Flanders, Lieven Gevaert (founder of the Agfa-Gevaert Group), the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography and Visual Studies aims at studying the art of photography in a broad interdisciplinary and international field. www.lievengevaertcentre.be info@lievengevaertcentTe.be MIRIAD is the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design, the North West of England's lead Higher Education centre for the study of the creative arts and for the development of the quality of cultural industries. MIRIAD is a structured Research Institute, Graduate School and Innovation Centre. MIRIAD Research is made up of six Research Centres that are locally managed and subject-based. www.miriad.mmu.ac.uk miriad@rnrnu.ac.uk Benjamin Greenman, University of Essex Merav Yerushalmy, University of Essex Common Identities? From Post-Identity Discourse to Concepts of Communality and Participation in Contemporary Art The term 'post-identity' has been used to describe a general tendency in the 1990s to rethink questions of identity. It designates a shift from an analysis of social processes in which the subject is constituted to a theorisation of identity as an open process of iteration and deconstruction. In discourses on art the question of identity has been articulated alongside such concepts as intersubjectivity and performativity Interpretation itself has been conceptualised as a process of identity formation. The intensive debate around such issues in art history and cultural theory has spurred much criticism, especially with regard to its polarisation of the research field. In the past few years, however, there has been a notable fatigue with such concerns and a manifest desire, in both theory and practice, to find new critical approaches not only to the conceptualisation of the subject but also to that of larger social and political structures. In recent debates there has been a growing emphasis on notions of communality and participation. A desire has been expressed to find renewed ways to speak of plurality - the 'we' - beyond the concept of identity. The performance of participation has been discussed as one potential way of producing open ended, fluctuating forms of communality. Similar concerns have also been voiced within the discourses of relational, dialogical, situational and other socially engaged art practices. The session explores current concerns within both post-identity discourse and practices and theories of communality, pointing to broader questions about their relationship and the nature of a shift between the two. J13 Ignacio Estella Noriega (Universidad Carlos III) BEYOND DEMOCRACY: Ruxus and the Dilemmas of Pluralism, Individualism and "Common Front" Fluxus is probably one of those (non-) movements that seem to be at the origin of several contemporary preocupations: not only the more traditional tendency of concept art but, more recently, "relational art" and even the idea of "network" as developed in digital art practices seems to find its roots in Fluxus. Following this path of the idea of collaborative process applied to art groups and contemporary commonal formations is Hannah Higgins' book "Fluxus experience", in which not only Fluxus stands as a democratic collaborative group where differences were dealt with smoothly but, for her, other interpretations are debunked due to their presumed easiness and simplicity. Doing this H. Higgins is probably re-staging the debates around democracy, dictatorship and "common front" that former "impresario" of Fluxus G. Maciunas and her father, Dick Higgins, had at the beginning of the 60's. By establishing so, this paper will show how these debates were exposing the very limits of liberal democracy since G. Maciunas' idea of fluxus was concerned with the loss of individuality and the production of a "common front" that, he assumed, reigned in Soviet umbrella countries. This paper will expose these debates and analyse in depth the foundations of the democratic Ruxus approachment, going back to John Dewey -paradoxically another standpoint in the idea of pluralism in liberal thought, as established by Richard Rorty. Finally it will develop Maciunas' idea of Huxus, intimately attached to the ending of individualist democracy. This will also have resonances with Laclau's recent theories about pluralism. Silvia Casini Queen's University of Belfast Questioning the Identity of MRI Images through a Curatorial Practice. The background for my paper concerns collaborations and contaminations between artists and scientists as the locus par excellence of shifting identities, both as regards the actors involved - the artist, the scientist, sometimes the attached observer - and the artefacts produced - work of art or scientific finding. I restrict my focus to the images by a cutting-edge medical imaging technique, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). These images are created and interpreted within the scientific laboratory and often applied in the clinical field. However, when these images migrate to the artist's atelier, they call for a deconstruction of their identities in so far they exist both as images to be seen and as data to be read. Relying on my on-going experience as curator in charge of an art exhibition of the work of the French painter and sculpture Marc Didou ­whose art concentrates on the use of MRI -, I will discuss the effort to make sense of this double presence of the MRI scans as images and as numbers. In order to grasp how images work and what they perform on us, one has to get involved with them. In the rather over inflated field of science-art relationship, what kind of curatorial strategies are useful to understand and make visible a discourse on identities? The curator-researcher might be capable of showing that it is the practice of these fluid relationships and discourses that makes participation possible. Katarzyna Kosmala Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh Resisting Identities And Their Utopias in new Europe Research into the (reconstruction of the professional and private Irfeworlds as well additional categories of the 'political', technological and performative has opened up the field of video as a space of organization of forms for resistance to the dominant discourse in contemporary arts. This paper examines the examples of video installation works from new EU territories that attend to both ambiguous constructions of self and the difficulty of political identifications, as in the work of e.g. Marina Grzinic (Slovenia) or Ene-Liis Semper (Estonia). Eastern European (EE) artistic originality is less a specific repertoire of particular art forms and more a series of idiosyncratic, aesthetic strategies and local applications of already familiar forms (echoes of transgressive gestures, the Utopian promise of the avant­garde, play with subversive techniques of performance/physical theatre). Identity processes here are constituted by an interesting hybrid of ideological domination, resistance and socio-economic and cultural (meta)change, particularly in the 1990s, a decade where the art status of EE was redefined in a globalised (arts) market while nevertheless appealing to what constitutes 'our reality' in EE, especially representation of (traumatic) memory. Belonging to new Europe' discourse forms the locus of a management of meanings by which global culture is maintained and transmitted and still the exploitative nature of capitalism criticised. EE artistic strategies can offer a productive perspective on the complexity of identity representation in Europe. I will examine paradoxes of identity in the selected video installation works, and their inconsistencies in terms of the conjunction between memory, self, and (un)conscious reflection. Session 18 Toni Ross University of New South Wales Models of Communality in the Art of Lucy Orta This paper offers a critical examination of the communal relationships presupposed by the art of Lucy Orta, which commingles clothing and textile design, sculpture, architecture and performance. Orta's work has been linked to "relational aesthetics" as identified by Nicolas Bourriaud, which describes a trend in '90s art towards the staging of participatory situations and inter-subjective encounters based on a democratic model of reciprocal dialogue and exchange. Orta also situates her art as responding to social and moral questions raised by the triumph of capitalism as a global economic system. The paper will focus on the Collective Architecture and Nexus Architecture series of works by Orta, which articulate the priority of communal bonds over and above sectional interests and desires. These works will be examined through the prism of two different conceptions of democratic communality. On the one hand, an organicist model of community traceable to Plato's account of the democratic Republic, and sustained in liberal theories of democracy. On the other hand, a Neo-Marxist and psychoanalytic conception of democratic communality articulated by philosopher Jacques Ranciere. Ranciere speaks of communal identity as constituted by an ongoing potential for internal torsion, as a whole that never quite coincides with itself. Common Identities? From Post-Identity Discourse to Concepts of Communality and Participation in Contemporary Art George Lovett Artist in Residence, Ayuntamiento de Huesca interCambiArquitectura (iCA): Relational Architecture? Identities determined by commercial forces, defining our shared experience and public space are challenged by artists / architects creating new interpersonal connections and modelling alternatives. The activit(y/ism) of interCambiArquitectura (iCA) suggests interactive forms which result in new spatial self-representation. This practise of a discipline defined by hierarchies, readdresses how architects might contest their preconceived identity, and how client-users are brought into the production space to participate. interCambiArquitectura (iCA) is a temporary, experimental workshop in Huesca, Spain, where 'intercambio', 'cambiar' and 'arquitectura' are merged to represent a service beyond economics; reassessing public intervention, and how alternative architectural practise might be realised. Such predecessors as muf are referenced, who "push their projects to extend territory that can be called 'public'" uniquely challenging observer / participant value systems. "Strategies of reversal", bringing the public to action, are essential for public spaces to signify participant identity. Lefebvre discussed the creation of social space as a process, which through self-presentation and representation results in form, rather than a single act. Modelling possibilities in real time and space, through collaborative networking and critical responses, embeds them in 'lived' experience. The iCA project values processes, failures and relations as products. By shifting the emphasis, is a decommodified possibility for architecture achieved? Can architects empower people through new organisational structures? The proposed paper will critically reflect on experiences and collaborations of iCA, relative to academic discourse, examining the possibilities of Relational Architecture? Ming-Hui Chen _-| 16 Loughborough University School of Art and Design Session 19 Toward A New Age of Asian Art Becoming the next dominant power in the global economy in the twenty-first century, the Asia-Pacific region has attracted the world's attention to its contemporary artistic presentation. In the past twenty years, many cities in the Asia-Pacific region have been at the centre of both economic growth and cultural re-examination. Globalisation has brought the Asian metropolis to deconstruct its own cultural heritage, and urbanisation has created an urgent question for its people to re-consider development, competition, modernised cultures and values. In recent years, there have been several biennials and triennials held in the Asia-Pacific region, including the Busan Biennale, Fukuoka Triennial, Guangzhou Triennial, Gwangju Biennale, Hong Kong Art Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Singapore Biennale, Taipei Biennale, Triennial of Chinese Contemporary Art etc, which have created a phenomenon which was unique to this region. During these exhibitions, the artists have often combined their own cultural languages with high technology, re-interpreted their traditional aesthetics and re-defined their traditional materials, by which they have declared their national identity and represented their post-colonial discourses. The papers selected for this session have focused on curators' strategies and historians' observations which help contemporary Asian art to be understood, and which address how the artists have hybridised their artistic language within a modern ideology. These papers will argue how the artists and curators have found the balance between nationalism and globalisation in the Asia-Pacific region. _117 Felix Schober University of Westminster From Identity to Technology - the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennial In 1995, the first Taiwan Pavilion opened its gates at the Venice Biennial. Until 1999 it was regarded as a National Pavilion but by the turn of the millennium, it was downgraded to an associated special exhibition. This change of political and diplomatic status was accompanied by a transformation in its curatorial focus, that shifted from the presentation of a socio-cultural microcosm in the 1990s to a themed show that tried to enter into a dialogue with global discourses exclusively through the means of new media. I would like to bring attention to three phenomena: firstly, I would like to argue that the national identity presented during the 1990s was informed by a very particular notion of socio-cultural science, which created a highly artificial microcosm, through a cool modernist gaze from above. This curatorial pattern continues to be applied even until now. Secondly, the attempt to enter into a dialogue with international art scene led to an exclusion of traditional media such as paintings on canvas, as well as a predilection for young artists in favour of the father figures of the local art scene. Thirdly, the process of entering into a dialogue with global discourses in some cases involved a process of (museological) 'secularisation' and 'removal from the original context', which means that in some cases, different meanings are forced upon artists' works. Li-En Chong National University of Singapore There's No Business like Show Business: Art in the Singapore Biennale 2006 The grand exposition of the Singapore 2006: Global City, World of Opportunities opened in September 2006, showcasing the country's successes as a first world economic power and Asian Renaissance city wealthy in cultural capital. Comprising main component events of the International Monetary Fund and the Singapore Biennale 2006, financial ministers and moguls, superstar artists and curators journeyed to this Southeast Asian island measuring just 660 square kilometres. The Singapore Biennale is curated under the theme of Belief with the intention of providing a 'platform for the presentation of international art in dialogue with Singapore and Asia'. Beyond the immediate aesthetic and conceptual concerns of individual artworks, the theme of Belief encourages exploration into greater issues that delve into perceptions about and within this young nation-state, the acceptance of suppositions, the trusting of presented facts as well as the relevance of individual experiences in shaping our beliefs. SB2006 is presented in various places of worship that venerate religion, the state, colonial history and culture. By placing the artworks in contexts of display unique to Singapore, they are empowered with multi-faceted readings that offer perspectives on Singapore's cultural position and positioning. In my talk, I plan to discuss a range of artworks such as The adventures of MocMoc and MerMer by Com and Com, We live in a Dangerous World by Brian Gothong Tan and Yayoi Kusama's Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees. I will develop my discussion in the direction of how these artworks are informed by their display, their place within the curatorial framework and relation to Singapore cultural policy. Elizabeth Norman Independent Scholar, formerly Sheffield Hallam University 'A New Model Arts Festival': The Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in Japan The Echigo-Tsumari Triennial was conceived in the late 1990s as part of a larger social and economic project for a rural and remote region in Japan facing a declining economy and decreasing population. Six municipalities in Niigata Prefecture joined together to form a 'necklace' or partnership of communities and began an art and culture-based programme of regeneration with a triennial as its defining feature. The Echigo-Tsumari Triennial then is an oddity; it is not a stand-alone art event but attached to a 10 year regional revrtalization project. There have been three triennials. The most recent was held in the summer of 2006 and it may be the last in this form. The project is due to end in 2007, but there can be no total closure for the triennial. On the vast 760 sq.km. site there are now many permanent art works (for example, TurreH's ryokan-sited sky hole, Abramovic's Japanese Dream House), some new on-going projects (a number of abandoned houses and schools selected for reuse as 'house-museums' involving artists such as Boltanski and Japanese craftsmen), and the region re-identified by the triennial as process and event. Nonetheless, the triennial is vulnerable for it does require artists, Asian and Western, to work in a very Japanese milieu, its villages and nature. The Director asks only for this commitment. Artists and visitors are challenged to respond to the national and global agendas of this sequence of triennials. At the Echigo-Tsumari, contemporary art is revealed in a unique temporal and cultural context. Jariya Nualnirun University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce Popular Thai Songs: Investigating Thai National History in Modem Memory This paper examines popular Thai songs as a reflection of a historical narrative in collective memory constructed by modern Thai people. This lively historical narrative is resistance to colonialism of Thai nation state in the late nineteenth century, reshaped as Thai nationalism later during 1940s. Thailand, although, is undergoing into the age of globalization, a struggle with the foreign invaders of previous generations has continually been appeared. Using philosophical perspectives, ways of investigating in what message transcended a barrier of time through the popular songs are clarified. In the present, Thai entertainment industries produce popular music which has exactly imitated melodies and styles from western ones. Even so, the words of a song can represent an original work of Thai artist. Most Thai songs tell stories about love as a main issue. Unlike the west, songs in contemporary Thai society can hardly articulate what problems really occur now, such as gender and racial inequalities. Instead of narrating the current social issues, the song lyrics accurately depict the lives of heroes and events in the last century. In this case, the lyricists express a sense of homogenous Thai identity, as well as a unit of the country. Consequently, this timeless value has permanently been recorded in consciousness of the Thais. How does such historical narrative constituted as a temporal one in modem memory? The paper tries to respond to this question. Session 19 Toward A New Age of Asian Art Beccy Kennedy MIRIAD Contesting Identities in Contemporary Korean Art The content of contemporary South Korean art is often analyzed using binaries, such as spiritualistic traditionalism versus 'modernity' and indigenous versus globalized culture. It also tends to highlight the theme of traditional Korean 'Identity' or 'Koreanness' and juxtapose it against the medium of new digital installation technology. However, this paper asks whether the understanding of contemporary Korean art works by Korean and non-Korean audiences could be informed by and examined through the lens provided by fresher observations and concepts than these. For example, does Korean art history need to address how the input of the artist is based around the broader issues of 'post modern' identity politics rather than the aforementioned preferred readings, which select archetypical Korean political and religious histories as their main point of reference? Such traditional paradigms place Korea within a backward context and imply the continued presence of an Orientalist, outside voice. Moreover, in relation to Korea's distanced relationship with Europe, how far can Korean art be positioned within a centre/periphery, post colonialist discourse? To some extent, the dearth of theoretical literature on contemporary Korean art appears to have inhibited its trajectory, causing writers to provide a definitive and categorical overview of its recent developments, without thorough analyses of particular artists and their lifestyle choices. The traditional versus modernity model, despite its initial relevance has limitations as a response to contemporary Korean lifestyles as experienced by Korean artists in Korea and in Diaspora. Whilst focusing this discussion on contemporary Korean and Korean-British Diasporic art works, the paper will explore these issues and hopefully avoid the danger of situating and enclosing a particular national, cultural history into specific and possibly outdated discourses. Mary Ann Steggles University of Manitoba, Canada The Assertion of the New, of the Chinese, in World Art Practice The number of Chinese artists accepted to the 1999 Venice Biennale or the explosion of Asia Pacific biennales since then has contributed to the shift in global art world attention from traditional to contemporary practice. Significant, also, is that the West has been jarred by the "sleeping dragon", best exemplified by Pop Zhao's Olympic Dragon heralding Beijing's bid for the 2008 Olympics. As the popular media portrays China as no more than a nation "torn between democracy and Chinese nationalism, capitalism, and communism, a Kantian future and a Confucian past" it is astute to keep in mind that it is in just such contradictions that contemporary Chinese artists continue to draw their inspiration just as artists in the past drew from their contemporary political, economic, and social contradictions (J. So, The Daily, 8/12/99, pg. 1). My paper argues that as young artists examine their relationship to ideals found in Daoism and an emerging affluent world, we must, as educators and curators, resist the temptation to see only the surface, to seek out individualism and marshal our reaction, organization of exhibitions, and our writing about contemporary Chinese art as merely a plagiarism of the West. Specifically, I examine how recent work by Pop Zhao and Zhang Xiaogang are significant examples of how contemporary Chinese artists are re­interpreting traditional beliefs in Daoism and Confucianism to reassert China's position within 21st century artistic discourse. Victoria Lu MoCA, Shanghai; Shih Chien University, Taipei The Neo-aesthetics of Heterogeneity in Chinese Contemporary Art Entering upon the digital environment of the 21st century, the channels for obtaining knowledge have become more open and diverse. Along with increasing materialism, the more sophisticated atmosphere of living not only manifests itself in aesthetics of forms but more so in the increasing spiritual desire for beauty. The contemporary art of China in the new century inevitably steps toward Neo-eclecticism, uniting the experiences of Conceptual art and process of materials, and opens up a more liberal dialogue. It not only re-excavates and builds new perspectives and explications, but also chooses to narrate an individual artist's contemporary experience through sampling the different spices between cultures in this global melting pot. Continuous contemplation, assembly, unification, re-assembly, rebirth, including even questions of gender, have cross-pollinated to give rise to a heterogeneity of visual forms. This heterogeneity includes the familiar vein of traditional art, which has become one of the many options of the possibilities of Eclecticism. Jiang Jiehong UCE Birmingham Institute of Art and Design The Revolution Continues The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76) has often been referred to as the 'ten lost years'. Almost all the cultural products during the decade were based on the requirements of political campaigns, and therefore have been considered valueless for China's cultural development. However, the phrase 'cultural revolution' literally sounds rather positive. It can be read as an urge to re-establish the foundation of Chinese culture. This paper aims to discuss the visual legacies of the Cultural Revolution that have been reflected visually by contemporary artists, contributing to the prosperity of Chinese art today. Four approaches are central to this curatorial research. 1) It is to review and re-evaluate the Red Guard movement, during which the rebellious spirit of the Red Guard against the existing rules and authorities had been encouraged and fostered, and then inherited by the Chinese avant-garde artists in their practice. 2) The big-character poster was one of the most popular visual instruments of propaganda, as a non-pictorial medium, during the Cultural Revolution. The power of Chinese written words has been revisited in contemporary art. 3) The complexity of the colour red can be achieved not only by the physical colour itself, which was dominant in the country, but also implied by the image of Mao as the 'red precious portrait'. As a visual response, artists have been re-appropriating the colour red and reshaping the sacred image of Mao subversively. 4) There were numerous mass assemblies and parades in Mao's era, where the collective appeared with a pair of contrasting images, either in conformity or carnival. In Chinese art today, the people's collective identity can be reinterpreted as a visual representation of 'Chineseness' in an international context. Jan Mrazek National University of Singapore Discussant Christopher Bedford, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art Jennifer Wulffson, Getty Research Institute, 122 Los Angeles Session 20 Beyond Recognition: The Outer Limits of Artistic Creation and Critical Reception after September 11, 2001 In the wake of 9/11, a surge of art writing emphasized the democratic and expressive qualities of art in a world defined anew by grief, uncertainty, paranoia, and anger. James Wood of the Chicago Institute of Art, for example, affirmed in November 2001, '[a]rt can become our Virgil shepherding us through the labyrinth of life and death. It reaffirms the beauty and creativity that distinguish man-made expression from raw nature and reaffirms tolerance and embrace of diversity.' Approached as historical documents, such statements are striking in their reliance on a conception of art-making as an inherently redemptive, humanistic act, a quixotic intellectual conviction that vanished long ago with the rise of post-modernism, if not before. Yet since 2001 the critical community- while often invoking the notion that 9/11 has altered the way we understand extant art- has been less receptive to new projects. As Sarah Boxer noted in early 2002, '[tjhe events of September 11, 2001 were beyond measure. But when the day ended, the visual limits were fixed.' Boxer's observation is evinced by a reinvigoration of photojournalistic images. But has our reflects on 9/11 ? It appears that faith in the capacity of art to represent and interrogate our responses does not underwrite the discourse of art criticism today, despite recent efforts by artists such as Jenny Holzer, Thomas Ruff, and Carolee Schneeman. Has criticism, consequently, stymied the capacity of visual art to engage such matters? Royce W. Smith Wichita State University "We are all Americans,," but are we all Americans?: The Cinematographic Responses to 9/11 in Alain Brigand's 11'9"01 Jean-Marie Colombani exclaimed "We are all Americans!" in Paris' Le Monde on 12 September 2001. Nevertheless, five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, striking cognitive reconfigurations of this statement have surfaced—signaling pointed anti-American sentiments, perhaps best illustrated by the Swiss newspaper Le Temps' assertion on 12 September 2006: "We are all Hezbollah!" While this exclamation clarifies significant changes in global attitudes toward 9/11, Alain Brigand's 11 '9"01, produced in 2002, underscores the need for art and film to use the event as a catalyst for multicultural exchange, as opposed to a rationale for socio-political isolationism and xenophobia. As a compendium of short films by eleven directors, the project was the first to challenge the "you-are-either-with-us-or-against-us" polemic that saturated post-9/11 American political rhetoric. Delayed in its United States release by over a year and then only screened in selected markets, the film raised crucial, disconcerting questions about the attack and its subsequent politicization: Who maintains "ownership" of the iconographies and discourses of 9/11 ? How do the traumas of 9/11 compare to those experienced with greater frequency and greater magnitude, yet lesser visibility, in other areas of the world? This paper examines 11 '9"01 as an important filmic gesture that transformed the visual chronicle of 9/11 from a predictable stable of photojoumalistic images into an array of complex cultural dialogues and visual exchanges. By focusing particularly on the short films of Samira Makhmalbaf, Idrissa Ouedraogo. and Alejandro Gonzalez lharritu, I contend that the now-familiar images of 9/11 have triggered a movement away from the literalness of catastrophe toward more conceptual and experimental representations that expose the variabilities, similarities, and incompatibilities between cultures, places, and ideologies. I conclude that the films collectively encourage new modes of visual criticality that engage with 9/11 as an event whose meaning is brokered relationally, rather than materially or site-specifically. Given the radically different ways of seeing that contribute to the semiotic complexities of 9/11, these films expose the myriad ways in which the rhetorical ambiguities of "terror(ism)" may be artistically represented now and historically contextualized in the future. Julian Stallabrass Courtauld Institute of Art Joel Meyerowitz's Photographic Monument to 9/11 While it is true that many of the art works that have sought to deal with 9/11 have had a rough critical response, this is not so of one art project carried out in photographs: Joel Meyerowitz's Aftermath, published and exhibited in 2006. It comes at a time when 9/11, for some time a zone of silence even in much mass culture, is being addressed by novels and movies. Meyerowitz's 9/11 work offers a series of contrasts with much of the photojournalism that has been published in other memorial volumes. It conforms with the dictates of large-scale contemporary art photography, and in its elegiac character it is comparable to the work of Peress, Norfolk, Seawright and many others who have addressed various tragedies in 'aftermath' mode. This paper will examine the causes of the success of Meyerowitz's project and offer comparisons with other art works, and with photojournalism so as to highlight the limits of acceptable representation in the image of 9/11. Rachel Wells Courtauld Institute of Art Beyond Resolution: Thomas Ruff's Pixelated 'Jpeg' Photographs of 9/11 While it is true that many of the art works that have sought to deal with 9/11 have had a rough critical response, this is not so of one art project carried out in photographs: Joel Meyerowitz's Aftermath, published and exhibited in 2006. It comes at a time when 9/11, for some time a zone of silence even in much mass culture, is being addressed by novels and movies. Meyerowitz's 9/11 work offers a series of contrasts with much of the photojournalism that has been published in other memorial volumes. It conforms with the dictates of large-scale contemporary art photography, and in its elegiac character it is comparable to the work of Peress, Norfolk, Seawright and many others who have addressed various tragedies in 'aftermath' mode. This paper will examine the causes of the success of Meyerowitz's project and offer comparisons with other art works, and with photojournalism so as to highlight the limits of acceptable representation in the image of 9/11. Session 20 Terry Smith University of Pittsburgh Critical Art Practice in the Age of Aftermath There is a mismatch between the current dominant approaches to contemporary art criticism and the increasing thirst on the part of artists to negotiate, through their art, relationships to the currents that are definitive of contemporaneity, especially when these break into the public sphere as "events." While we might not be surprised that the burgeoning market for contemporary art tends to eschew such challenges, It is disappointing that—with some striking exceptions—established criticism has become so constrained that it seems to preclude any adequate response to the issues involved. Events such as 9/11 seem too internally complex to meet "1960s style" political art criteria, too crudely materialist for postmodern taste, too specific and implicated to transcend neoavantgarde negativity, and too large in implication for the low-key indirection and small-scale communality favored by relationalist aesthetics. For certain artists, this is discouraging. A more robust reaction might be to ask: what has happened to the "critical" in criticism, and in theory? This would constitute the first part of my paper. Alongside and away from this cul-de-sac, a wide range of affective and effective artwork has emerged, as the trauma slowly unfolds, surfaces and settles, and as the larger forces of globalization and postcoloniality continue their world wide contention. In the second part of my paper I would be interested in tracking this emergence through a set of pertinent examples, which I would place within a larger debate about the changing nature of ethical and political practice in current art, and in the framework of my thinking about contemporary art in the conditions of contemporaneity. Beyond Recognition: The Outer Limits of Artistic Creation and Critical Reception after September 11, 2001 Julia Meltzer and David Thome Speculative Archive: Not a matter of if but when How does a document say, in the same breath, "This will happen," "This has already happened," and "This must not be allowed to happen"? We will present excerpts from recent work—In Possession of a Picture, not a matter of if but when, and We will live to see these things—to consider the ways in which a given record of the past becomes an image of a possible future. Liam Kelly, School of Art and Design, University of Ulster Session 21 Taking to the Streets: Art and the Architecture of Security and Control The cities of Belfast and Derry in Northern Ireland have been heavily fortified and defended and as such are where the physical apparatus of the political troubles, in various ways, can best be experienced. Army and police vehicles and helicopters have, over the years, daily paraded or surveyed these cities, while army and police stations became more and more purposefully designed for long- term fortification. These cities have been marked, segregated and intensely surveilled. Temporary barricades between the two rival communities have been erected or dismantled over the years or settled into permanent acceptance as necessary so-called peace lines. A number of artists, both local and international, have responded to this legacy of the physical and emotional environment of division, security and control in the North of Ireland by way of painting, photography, video and installation art practices. Nicola Mann University of Rochester, USA Visual and Cultural Studies The Extraordinary Ordinary: A Consideration of the Phantasmagoria in Daniel Roth's Cabrini Green Forest (Portal) 2004, as Representative of the 'Underground' Characteristics of the Chicago Housing Project Daniel Roth's Cabrini Green Forest installation was exhibited at the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago during May and June of 2004 and is part of a series entitled Zones of Dissolution. Roth's installation includes relics of a mythic woodland trail connecting the real urban spaces of the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in Chicago with the Cabrini Green housing project. Framed by Roth's exhibition, my paper considers the distinctly 'underground' characteristics of Cabrini Green, in terms of the social, governmental and architectural factors that have resulted in the residents' retreat into subculture. Entrapped within the steel mesh galleries of the breezeblock high-rise buildings, the residents are detached from the city as a whole. Since the construction of the project (1942-1968), Cabrini Green has been plagued by gang culture, racial segregation, unemployment, crime and concentrated poverty. Controlled by the gangs who hold them hostage, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), the buildings in which they live, and the surveillance and security measures that are employed to keep the residents and outsiders 'safe', the project became a quasi-independent city. Yet, despite being forced underground, the rhizomatic paths of community still exist; generations of families can live within the same building and there are some residents who never leave their 'world'. The argument that I assert in my paper is that the higher up the buildings go the further underground the communities exist. The CHA, under the controversial banner of the 'Ran for Transformation', are currently enforcing the displacement of 60,000 public housing residents to make way for mixed-income developments on housing project land. My paper considers community agency in the form of court challenges by residents against the CHA and resilient tenant counterproposals. Roth's installation, which includes cartographical-framed drawings of the underground wooded trail, reproduces the contrary social space that is Cabrini Green. These vestiges of Roth's surreal archaeological path reflect the fact that the residents are currently in a time of change, caught in the indeterminate state between the housing they have always known and a future that has been forced upon them. My paper considers this issue of displacement and the resident's residual determination to fight for their homes, in the contextual frame of Cabrini Green Forest. Aisling O'Beirn University of Ulster Some Things About Belfast (Or So I'm Told) For this paper I shall be giving a vernacular tour of Belfast, which will take the form of a story telling presentation rather than a formal paper or a physical tour. This 'tour' will encompass unofficial, informal accounts of the city with an emphasis on urban myths, urban anecdotes and place nicknames. Belfast is a city that has, in the past, been the focus of much media attention and consequently has often also been subject to cliched and simplistic representations (which one could argue, have been politically unhelpful). The format of this paper will attempt to engage with contemporary Belfast and challenge simplistic representations by giving a platform to localised, informal and vernacular testimonies, as these can relay a complexity, depth and humour that also characterises the city. The premise of this strategy is that such accounts can provide an insight into the politics of place by focusing on the local, whilst positioning it in a global context. Belfast is not the only city to have urban myths.The 'virtual' (as in not physically on tour) format of the tour also affords a possibility to consider Belfast in relation to other cities and urban locations. The constraints of representing a city using virtual means, ironically, open up possibilities to position Belfast in relation to ideas about the nature of contemporary urban space and how it is represented. •am Kelly School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast 'Seeing You/Seeing Me: Art and The Disembodied Eye'. Many Northern Irish artists have looked upon the city as a 'written' text be engaged with and deconstructed. The cities of Belfast and Deny have been heavily fortified and defended and as such are where the physical and psychological apparatus of the political 'troubles' can best be experienced. The artists considered in this paper have responded to the formal as well as the layered values that get laid into walls, fortifications, and buildings - the psychic fabric of the city. Their work is an act of continual interrogation. In this interrogation they often deploy the strategy used by state surveillance itself, namely the use of the camera by stealth (the disembodied eye) or engage with intelligence gatherings more physical or dramatic outward display. In either case what this artistic interrogation has established is the corrupting nature of difference by way of a tendency to either include or exclude, to locate or dislocate. Within this social construction as it applied to Northern Ireland, the wall becomes the dividing line between the cultured inner and the riotous barbarous other. In relation to this, the surveillance tower, the hovering helicopter, the roving police vehicle allowed for the supervision of the extra mural. David Brett University of Ulster Alan Jones Queens University, Belfast In Contested Space: Space and Security in Town and Country, Northern Ireland Different concepts of space are briefly considered; though 'absolute' space is where building are realised, architecture cannot proceed without a consideration of what we term 'relational' or 'intersubjective' space, this is where social reflations are conducted. This brings with it, in all complex communities, the secondary concepts of 'contested' and 'defensive' spaces. This has been recognised throughout Northern Ireland in terms of the urban 'quarter' (as in 'Scotch Quarter') or the rural 'townland', and defined very largely in sectarian terms descending from patterns of settlement. Because space is a fundamental category of human experience, how space is defined and considered and spoken about reveals something of the constitution of every community; in the context of Northern Ireland this reveals the fundamentally contested nature of its social spaces.Some particular examples are considered... The notion of the townland and patterns of rural settlement and the relation of this landscape - the centre-less community and the dispersal of authority. The provincial agora; the case of Randalstown. The circulation patterns of Housing Executive estates and their unintended consequence ­the perpetuation and confirmation of sectarian boundaries. The question of boundaries; how are they conceived and how are they marked. Attempts to overcome these conceptualisations face great difficulty predsefy because of the fundamental character of space and its categorisation. The argument is conducted in reference to ideas developed by D.H. Harvey, Kenneth Frampton, and the authors own previous studies and practice. Session 22 Fae Brauer, The University of New South Wales/University of East London Anthea Callen, University of Nottingham Contesting the Body: Art, Sexualities and Biogenetics When the Third Reich Eugenic Sterilization Law was applied, both the American and British Eugenics Societies congratulated Hitler. He in turn acknowledged the eugenic policies fostered in these nations as his precedent. Before eugenics was stigmatized by the Holocaust and Western histories sanitized of its prevalence, a huge array of eugenic associations, committees, organizations and societies, together with their conferences, congresses, exhibitions, designs, journals and programmes flourished from Northern Ireland to Tokyo. Synthesising Galton's Neo-Darwinian concept of superior races with August Weismann's discovery of germ plasm heredity, Race Hygiene associations spread across Europe, particularly Germany and Scandinavia. Drawing upon Galtonian and Mendelian eugenics, as well as race hygiene strategies, the American Breeders Association was founded. At the same time, societies for health, hygiene, temperance, natalism, nudism, body culture, the worship of nature, the pursuit of sunlight and the eradication of degeneracy burgeoned across Europe. Within these different and competing models of health, hygiene, normalcy and eugenics, the body and its sexualities became a site of contestation, as revealed by art and visual cultures. This Session aims to examine these manifestations through art and visual cultures in Britain, America, France, Germany and the Soviet Union. It will explore the dysgenic deployment of images of infirmity in the nineteenth century produced by Theodore Gericault and the medical photography of Hugh Diamond and Albert Londe. It will examine the 'cult of the sun' in fin-de-siecle France, how it was posited as a source of regeneration in climatotherapy and heliotherapy and became seminal to the art and tourism of Henri Matisse, Henri Manguin and Henri-Edmond Cross. It will investigate the form and function of the sanitoria as eugenic architecture. It will consider how woman's body became a site of contestation between Lamarckian eugenicists and Reform Feminists in 'belle epoque' France as manifested by Modernist and 'official' art, before pursuing the eugenic ramifications of representing Soviet 'New Woman' in Soviet Socialist visual culture as a sex object during the Nazi 'rape of the motherland'. Finally it will explore the relationship of eugenics and biogenetics to bioart and transgenic practices being conducted today, in order to debate the possibilities of art going beyond an aesthetic of genetics.