New Resource: The Edwardian Culture Network

A new interdisciplinary project designed to bring together scholars working on various aspects of culture in Britain between the years 1895-1914

The Edwardian Culture Network will provide an online database of researchers and resources, updates on current exhibitions and publications, and a platform for discussion and organising events. We are also working towards the creation of an online journal.

Our inaugural conference, ‘Beyond the Garden Party: Re-Thinking Edwardian Culture’, will held at the University of York in April 2013, for which further details will be circulated this Autumn. In the meantime, we are developing our website, which can be found at:http://www.edwardianculture.com. Key to the success of this site is our directory of researchers in the field. If you would like to join this list, please e-mail us with a short ‘blurb’ consisting of 100 words about your research, your institutional affiliation, a list of keywords for your project, and a contact e-mail address (for examples please see http://www.edwardianculture.com/researchers). We will update the website regularly with news of events, exhibitions, publications, and interviews with researchers. If you come across anything that might be of interest to scholars of Edwardian culture, please send it our way! Please also forward this e-mail to anyone who might benefit from it. You can e-mail the project at edwardianculture@hotmail.co.uk.

Conference: Art and Science – Knowledge, Creation and Discovery

Association of Art Historians, Summer Symposium 2012, 28-29 June, The Linnean Society London

The AAH Summer Symposium is a two-day annual conference of doctoral research papers which takes place at a different university each year in early Summer; this year’s theme is Art & Science – Knowledge, Creation and Discovery. This year’s conference will take place at the Linnean Society in London – registriation is now open here, and you can read the rest of this blog entry for details of the full programme with speakers and paper titles.

Exhibition – British Silver: The Wealth of a Nation

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 15 May 2012 — 20 January 2013

The production of silver in Britain was understood to be the embodiment of the country’s prosperity—an outward expression of political stability, taste, and industriousness. The exhibition British Silver: The Wealth of a Nation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York explores some of the ingredients that made the English silver trade such a vigorous success in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Drawn largely from the Museum’s collections, it also includes extraordinary loans from private collectors, including Paul de Lamerie’s great rococo coffeepot of 1738 and the justly famous Maynard Dish belonging to the Cahn Family Foundation.

Call for Papers – Politeness and Prurience: Situating Transgressive Sexualities in the Long Eighteenth Century

Deadline for abstracts: 10 September 2012, Conference: University of Edinburgh, September 2-3 2013

This major international conference at the University of Edinburgh seeks not to present illicit sexuality as an underbelly to a dominant polite culture, but to reconcile the ‘two eighteenth centuries’ that have for too long been presented as the subject of two discrete discourses – politeness and prurience. The conference will address the interface between politeness and prurience as it appears throughout eighteenth-century visual, material and literary culture. Embedded within the narrative of John Cleland’s infamous novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), for example, is a vignette which affronts the moral compass of even the tale’s sexually promiscuous protagonist. Having attended a ‘drag masquerade’, Fanny bears witness, through a convenient crack in a wall, to a sodomitical act, which she finds ‘not only universally odious but absurd’. Despite her apparent condemnation, Fanny pruriently watches on. In its dichotomous nature, Fanny’s reaction – suggestive of both outrage and intrigue – mirrors reactions to homosexuality in the eighteenth-century and in its subsequent historiography, wherein it is treated at once as a site of fascination, but considered separately from the history of normative sexualities. Yet, situated as it is, within this literary feast of heterosexual eroticism, Fanny Hill’s same-sex love scene may seem incongruous.  Cleland’s text however, proffers a way to approach homosexuality as both explicitly aberrant and problematic, but still located within the general lexicon of eighteenth-century sexual congress. By the same token, Cleland offers a model for resituating the homosexual narrative within a wider historiography of sexuality, where its relationality to dominant modes, not its difference from them, might fruitfully be used as a way to re-evaluate transgressive sexualities during the period.

Exhibition: The Triumph of Pleasure – Vauxhall Gardens 1729 – 1786

The Foundling Museum: 11 May 2012 – 9 September 2012

The twenty first century public appetite for cultural consumption is unquenchable; but unbeknown to many, mass consumption of contemporary art, popular music and entertainment began over 200 years ago. In 1729 and 1739 two London institutions changed the face of British art forever, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens under the management of Jonathan Tyers and the Foundling Hospital for abandoned babies and England’s first public art gallery established by Thomas Coram. To ensure the success of the two institutions both men enlisted the help of two great artists of the age, painter and engraver William Hogarth and composer George Frideric Handel. The Foundling Hospital became the premier venue for London’s polite society to combine socialising and culture with philanthropy whereas Vauxhall Gardens was a place to enjoy contemporary music and art, spectacular design, al fresco dining, beautiful gardens and supper boxes from which to see and be seen. The Triumph of Pleasure: Vauxhall Gardens 1729 – 1786 will explore the Gardens, which for its visitors was an escape from daily realities and a re-affirmation of all the good things that life had to offer.

Michael Dean, Ed Atkins and Becky Beasley @ The Henry Moore Institute

The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds has announced a series of events for May/June 2012. The series runs alongside the current exhibition curated by Michael Dean, for which he has commissioned new work for the Institute that re-imagines Galleries 1,2 & 3, and involved inviting artists artists to make use of the exhibition space and his sculptures, as projection screens and sound stages. In May Ed Atkins is Dean’s guest, and in June, Becky Beasley.

Ed Atkins: A Primer for Cadavers 23rd May 2012: Atkins will screen a selection of his high definition videos on to the surface of Michael Dean’s large sculpture ‘health (working title)’. Atkins conjures surface, substance and embodied frequencies from the digital ether. His videos push to the peak of representation that which is both preposterously life-like and utterly dead.

Becky Beasley, in collaboration with Chris Sharp: 13 Pieces, 17 Feet 6th June 2012: Inspired by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s extraordinary 1878 panoramic photograph of San Francisco, and performed by writer, performer and sound artist Melanie Wilson, this monologue in thirteen parts uses multiple voices to follow an alternating structure between historical fictions and abstract texts.

Job Opportunity: Specialist in Modern & Post-War British Art at Sotheby’s

Francis Bacon, ‘Study for the Head of George Dyer’ (1966)

Sotheby’s is one of the most prominent and influential forces in the auction world, combining proud tradition with state-of-the-art expertise. Our Modern & Post-War British Art Department offers the very best of British Art from the 20th Century and we now require a Specialist to join the team.

Reporting to the Head of the Department, you will be involved in generating new business and will focus on key clients. Using your national and international networks, you will evaluate sale items and provide expertise to clients and colleagues. The role will involve working closely with colleagues to provide a stimulating and professional auction experience and the highest levels of customer service. You will also be involved in all aspects of the production of sale catalogues and play an active role in the effective running of the department.

This role calls for expert knowledge of and experience in Modern & Post-War British Art. Educated to degree level, preferably with an Art related Masters, you will possess excellent communication skills, a flexible approach and be comfortable operating both alone and as part of a team. With proven business acumen and valuation skills, you will have a sound appreciation of the whole auction process, be IT literate and be able to work well under pressure. You will also hold a clean UK driving licence.

Call for Papers “Radical Voices, Radical Ways: Articulating and Spreading Radical Ideas in the British Isles (17th-18th centuries)”

Université de Haute Alsace, FLSH, 10 rue des Frères Lumière, Mulhouse 68093: 11th April 2013 – 13th April 2013

Proposals deadline: 30th June 2012.

An International Interdisciplinary Conference, Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse (France) – 11-13 April 2013, with the support of ILLE (Institut de Recherche en Langues et Littératures Européennes, EA 4363). This conference is premised on the rejection of the “nominalist” approach to “radicalism” – radicalism did not exist until it was named - and makes a case for embracing a wider view of the issue. Although we are aware that the latter approach also has its inherent limitations we hope to offer general perspectives based on an exploration of varied sources produced in a variety of contexts. What is meant by “radicalism” here is any political doctrine or theory that challenges existing political, religious, economic and social norms and offers alternatives to them. This is the first of two conferences on radicalism, the second of which will concentrate on more recent times. Papers considering the modes of writing and transmission of radical ideas will be welcome. Diverse sources can be used such as written texts (whether manuscripts or printed documents), oral sources or visual documents: pamphlets, sermons, newspapers, petitions, correspondence, fiction, music, songs, toasts raised in company, conversations, images and illustrations, cartoons, visual arts, etc.

Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950 @ V&A

19 May 2012 – 6 January 2013, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

From 19 May 2012 the V&A celebrates the opening of the newly renovated Fashion Galleries with an exhibition of beautiful ballgowns, red carpet evening dresses and catwalk showstoppers.  Displayed over two floors, Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950 will feature more than sixty designs for social events such as private parties, royal balls, state occasions and opening nights.

The exhibition will cover over sixty years of a strong British design tradition that continues to flourish. Eveningwear from the V&A’s vast collection, by designers including Victor Stiebel, Zandra Rhodes, Jonathan Saunders and Hussein Chalayan, will be on show alongside dresses fresh from the catwalk shows of Alexander McQueen, Giles Deacon, Erdem and Jenny Packham.

In Translation: Women, Migration and Britishness

Manchester Art Gallery: Saturday 25 February 2012 – Saturday 23 February 2013, free

This exhibition is part of a major project working with women who have migrated to the North-West of England from all over the world. The women, drawn from a range of diverse backgrounds, are working with artists’ collective UHC (Ultimate Holding Company) to co-curate a display featuring and inspired by Manchester City Galleries’ collection of Empire Marketing Board Posters.

These posters were produced by the Empire Marketing Board, a promotional body set up by the British government in 1926. They are large, colourful lithographic prints, which are now regarded as a rare example of peace time government propaganda. Each set of posters promotes a way of thinking about the Empire – for example, as an eager market for British exports, or as a bounteous source of produce for the British tea table. Any darker ideas of ruthless colonial domination were kept at bay by the sheer brilliance of the posters. The poster campaign ran nationwide on Britain’s streets from 1926 to 1933.