Workshop: Feminist Object(ive)s: Writing Feminist Art Histories

University of York, 21st May 2013, 12.00 – 7.00pm

This event, hosted by the Centre for Modern Studies at the University of York, will explore the aims, challenges and complications of writing art histories from a feminist standpoint, considering feminist methodologies, encounters with feminist art and culture, and working with women artists, as well as more broadly politically engaged art practices. Six scholars will reflect on their experiences of engaging with and constructing feminist art histories, before a roundtable involving all participants at the end of the afternoon. Confirmed speakers: Henrietta Stanford (Courtauld Institute of Art), Hilary Robinson (Middlesex University), James Boaden (York), Sylvie Simonds (McGill), Catherine Grant (Goldsmiths), Harriet Riches (Kingston). 

Tate Britain: Looking at the View

Until 2 June 2013

This thematic display looks at continuities in the way artists have framed our vision of the landscape over the last 300 years. Coinciding with the re-opening of all Tate Britain’s galleries, the selection finds surprising coincidences and remarkable affinities in the way we look at the view, whether near or afar, high or low, from inside or out. Over seventy works by more than fifty artists are included, including familiar names such as J.M.W. Turner and Tracey Emin as well as lesser-known figures of British art history. The exhibition consists entirely of works from the Tate collection and is part of the BP British Art Displays.

Conference: Visual Culture in Crisis – Britain c.1800 – Present

Friday 10th – Saturday 11th May 2013, Bowland Auditorium, Berrick Saul Building, University of York.

Keynote Speakers: Professor Christopher Pinney (UCL), Dr Eric Stryker (Southern Methodist University), Dr. Chad Elias (University of York), and Corinne Silver (artist).

‘European mastery is always in crisis – and it is this same crisis that defines European modernity’ – Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

The word ‘crisis’ is frequently invoked to assess Britain’s current place in the world: crises in finance, journalism, politics and geopolitics dominate the media, all of which see the term used both to reflect, and manipulate, a sense of uncertainty and confusion on personal, national, and global levels. Taking its cue from Hardt and Negri’s location of ‘crisis’ as central to European modernity, this conference seeks to explore how visual cultures from the 19th century to the present have simultaneously responded to – and emerged from – such successive crises. Crisis might signify avant-garde break-through and embrace of modernity. It might impel artistic breakdown or flight from modernity, anarchic celebration, or resistance in the form of protest. Crisis in visual culture could above all be emblematic of the contingent nature of personal and political identities. As both a product and a precipitant of the inter-state and inter-subjective networks that have emerged in conjunction with imperialism and economic globalisation, crisis can articulate a disharmony between metropole and colony, centre and periphery, state and individual, working constantly to disrupt the geographical, cultural and class boundaries of peoples and nations.

This two-day conference, generously supported the British Art Research School at the University of York and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, aims to begin unpacking some of these issues.  See below for a full timetable of the event, or visit our website for more information: http://visualcultureincrisis.wordpress.com/

All welcome – there is no fee.  Please register by emailing visualcultureincrisis@gmail.com

Call for Papers – Identity Construction and Meaning

AAH Call for Papers for Student Summer Symposium 2013, University of Oxford, 20-21 June 2013. Proposals deadline, 1st April.

The concept of ‘identity’ is prolific within the visual arts and in many ways its pertaining issues have shaped the discipline of art history. The biographical approach to reading artists’ work privileged by Vasari in his Lives (1550) has had a lasting influence. The portrait remains an effective medium through which to narrate the historical and contemporary identity of particular institutions and nations, and the art market continues to rely upon authentic attribution. Yet this art history of names remains problematic and by no means comprehensively represents either the discipline of art history or the plural notions of identity that have come to influence it.

During the twentieth century, subjectivity was critiqued and revised: psychoanalysis destabilized the concept of a consistent and whole subject, positioning the self as an illusion of stability and a site of fragmentation; Barthes and Foucault challenged notions of authorship, arguing instead that the reader-viewer be considered in the creation and interpretation of a work. More recently, gender and postcolonial theory has cast light on notions of identity understood as performance and as Otherness, and new technologies, such as the Internet, have altered relations between international communities and provided new platforms for constructing identity.

Exhibition: Sylvia Sleigh

Tate Liverpool, until 3 May

Although widely over-looked in the field of modern and contemporary art, Sylvia Sleigh was a realist painter who became an important part of New York’s feminist art scene in the 1960s and beyond. She was particularly well-known for her explicit paintings of male nudes, which challenged the art historical tradition of male artists painting female subjects as objects of desire. The exhibition at Tate Liverpool will be Sleigh’s first UK retrospective, and the largest exhibition of her work to date.

Sleigh trained in painting at Brighton art School at a time when female art students were, as she recalled, ‘treated in a second-rate fashion’. Despite having a solo exhibition at Kensington Art Gallery in 1953, she received little public recognition until her move to New York in the 1960s. There Sleigh and her husband, the art critic and Guggenheim curator Lawrence Alloway, together created a home that welcomed artists, writers and musicians, many of whom Sleigh painted. These works radiate a sense of friendship and emotional attachment between the artist and her sitters, in addition to presenting an array of significant cultural figures from the time.    

Call for Papers: Benjamin, Barthes, and Fashion

Fashion and Theory: Exploring critical perspectives in fashion and dress studies. Friday 28th June 2013, University of Manchester

Historian, philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote on fashion’s relationship to modernity, commodity fetishism, history, and memory.  In his unfinishedArcades Project, the notes for a large section on Fashion reveal Benjamin’s desire to read the medium of dress culturally, materially, historically, and through his own brand of Marxist analysis. Roland Barthes developed a semiotic system for interpreting the discourse of fashion.  Barthes’The Fashion System, the seminal work on fashion and semiotics, suggests fashion can be understood as a language composed of codes, signs, and significations.

Both Barthes and Benjamin wrote on fashion’s relationship to temporality, memory and history, and both critically investigated the potential of dress as metaphor in literary and visual analysis.  In the vein of such work as Caroline Evans’ Fashion at the Edge (2003), which utilizes Benjamin’s writing on fashion and time, and Malcolm Barnard’sFashion as Communication (1996), which engages with Barthesian semiology, this conference invites new critical readings of fashion that engage with Benjaminian and Barthesian theories.

Symposium: The Architect as Furniture Designer

The Wallace Collection, London, 9 March 2013 10am – 5pm

The subject of architects designing furniture, for their own buildings or for commercial sale, was first investigated by Charles Handley-Read in the 1960s in his researches into 19th century architects and interiors. However, there have been few attempts to take a broad look at the subject since the exhibition and associated catalogue by Jill Lever in the RIBA Heinz Gallery in 1982. This symposium brings together a number of distinguished scholars and curators to speak on architects from the 18th century to the 21st century and their moveable contributions to the interiors of their buildings. The sessions will be chaired by Charles Hind, Chief Curator, RIBA Library and Julius Bryant, Keeper of the Word and Image Department, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Exhibition: Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip… Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–8

Frank Bowling, Crevice Reflecting Morning Light, 1977. Photo: c. Tate.

Tate Britain Focus Display, Until 30 April 2013.

Frank Bowling’s paintings sing out from the walls in this Tate Britain Focus display, tightly curated by Dr Courtney J. Martin. Bowling started creating his ‘poured paintings’ in New York during the 1970s, where he moved in 1966 after becoming increasingly frustrated with the London art world, and where came into contact with large-scale American abstraction. Laying the canvas on a constructed platform that he could tilt and move, Bowling would drop the paint onto it from heights of up to two metres, resulting in cataclysmic runs of bright colour that swirl dramatically together. Bowling has also described this process as ‘wet into wet’, and there’s a strong sense of the Romantic sublime to some of these works, with their thick rills of marbled paint evoking atmospheric weather effects and awe-inspiring geographical formations.

Call for Papers: Art History and Sound, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Three workshops: 6 December 2012, 14 March and 30 May 2013 (10.00 – 12.00), The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Cfp Deadline: 28 September 2012

Art historians constantly encounter traces of sound. These can take the form of notes in an illuminated manuscript, a textual echo of past noise and lost voices, or depictions of instruments, singers and dancers, captured on panel, canvas, paper, film or in wood, marble and bronze or spaces that have been specifically designed and built to embrace and amplify sound: pulpits, choir stalls, opera houses, the floor of the stock exchange. The aural is continuously intertwined with visual arts as content or context. In the 20th and 21st centuries especially artists have variously incorporated sounds, live and recorded, in their performances, happenings and multi-media installations putting into question the silence and fixity of visual art.

Conference: Playing in the Shadows at Tate Tanks

Tate Modern, The Tanks Friday 26 October 2012, 16.00 – 22.00 and Saturday 27 October 2012, 11.00 – 22.00. £20, concessions available.

Responding to the subterranean darkness of the Tanks and the radical experiments in projection and action included in the Tanks’ opening programme, this deconstructed symposium examines how artists and filmmakers have critically occupied the spaces between light and darkness, image and action.

The notion of performative projection, revisiting early precedents such as phantasmagorias and shadow plays, will be investigated through a collection of talks, discussions, screenings and performances highlighting a long tradition of work that animates our primal connection to the play of projected light and shadow. Reconsidering the darker side of modernism, this symposium moves out of the white cube and into the darkness, the space of projection, and towards artists’ efforts to intervene directly in the apparatus of cinema. Participants include Noam M. Elcott, Tina Keane, Lucy Reynolds, Aura Satz, Patrick Staff, Kerry Tribe, Duncan White and others.