IAS Miscellaneous

Art History Lectures

An inclusive exercise in cultural analysis, this book deals with the gravitas and folly of identity politics, the boom of so-called African art, and the fetish and fascination with a global Esperanto. Designed to provoke thought and feeling, it is hoped that this collection of essays on South African art will reach a wide audience. The book’s strength lies in its diversity of focus and cultural frameworks. It offers no defining system or divining rod. Rather, it is hoped that this book will provide a healthy contribution to an already thriving debate regarding the value and purpose of contemporary art, the on-going significance of the decolonising project, and the importance of art from Africa in the global pantheon.

In the World by Ashraf Jamal - in conversation with Tamar Garb

by Simon Constantine, Steve Edwards, Jonathan Stafford, and Andrew Witt. Responses from Tamar Garb. Moderated by Stephanie Schwartz.

First published in 1995, Allan Sekula’s Fish Story offers one of the most important and stunning critiques of the economic logic of global capital. The book, which was produced over seven years, and combines text and photographs into an ‘experimental essay’, tackles many of the myths driving globalization, including the immateriality of labour. The sea, Sekula demonstrates in photographs and words, not the ‘information superhighway’, still moves vast amounts of goods and people around the globe. Importantly, Fish Story provides its lessons in how to negotiate contemporary mythologies through an account of documentary’s history. Throughout it builds a cogent narrative about how and why the sea came to figure as one of documentary’s main protagonists. This symposium, which celebrates the launch of a new edition of Fish Story (MACK, 2018) seeks to address the book’s continued relevance.

Find more information at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2018/oct/ias-book-launch-approaching-sea-allan-sekulas-fish-story

IAS Book Launch: Approaching the Sea - Allan Sekula’s Fish Story

by Catherine Hall (Emerita Professor, UCL) and Lonnie Bunch (Honorary Visiting Research Fellow, IAS &  Director of the Smithsonian NMAAHC).

Speakers discussed the collection for the African American Museum and the political work involved. This discussion aims to set connections between the UK and the USA's status quo.

Catherine Hall in conversation with Lonnie Bunch

by Rosemary Bechler (OpenDemocracy)
Caterina di Fazio (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Satvinder Juss (King’s College)
Lorenzo Marsili (European Alternatives)
Niccolo Milanese (European Alternatives)
Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster)
Andrea Pisauro (Oxford Psychology/DiEM U.K.)
Marina Prentoulis (The University of East Anglia/Another Europe is Possible)
Uta Staiger (UCL European Institute)
Francesco Tava (University of the West of England)
Albert Weale (UCL Political Science) 
Jonathan White (LSE)

In the current climate of political instability, Agora Europe created an opportunity for a public debate on how to reorganize the European political space. The event at UCL, sponsored by the European Institute and the Institute of Advanced Studies, was an occasion to talk about the future of Europe, and to discuss the potential of European citizens to shape Europe’s political space. At this edition, the debate focused in particular on migration and Brexit as the central themes.

The Agora Europe Series on the European Political Space #5: Brexit and Migration

by Herman L Bennett (CUNY). Discussant: Toby Green (Kings College London)

Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves’ experiences in the Americas.

IAS Talking Points Seminar: African Kings and Black Slaves

by Terry Kurgan in conversation with Tamar Garb and Eva Hoffman

Terry Kurgan’s book begins with a family snapshot made by her Polish grandfather in 1939 on the eve of the war. Presenting this evocative image as a repository of multiple histories—public, private, domestic, familial and generational—she sets off on a series of meditations on photography that give us startling insights into how photographs work: what they conceal, how they mislead, what provocations they contain. Each essay takes up the thread of the story of her family’s epic journey across Europe as they flee—country by country—Nazi occupation, until they reach Cape Town, South Africa. But Kurgan takes detours, circles back, diverts attention elsewhere, enriching and also disrupting the narrative with digressions on the way Google has changed our relationship to photography, on her grandfather’s eloquent daily journals, on the shipboard flirtations of her fascinating grandmother, on vanity, on self representation, on loss and return, home and exile. Kurgan’s richly satisfying essays are part memoir, part travelogue, part analysis and they demonstrate her sophisticated understanding of a medium that has long engaged her as an artist.

Everyone is Present - Terry Kurgan in conversation with Tamar Garb and Eva Hoffman

by Anthony Gardner (University of Oxford), Magdalena Radomska (Art History Institute, Adam Mickiewicz University inPoznań), Marko Ilić (SSEES, UCL). Moderated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Post-socialist Art Centre, IAS, UCL)

This panel discussion brought together contributors to the special issue of Third Text on Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism and guest respondents to debate the legacy of the socialist system for contemporary art and politics.

'Research into the institutional settings and practicalities of artistic production during the socialist period is giving rise to more nuanced accounts that complicate the distinctions made between the heroism of the neo-avant-garde and complicity of official artists, revealing an art system that was more variegated, flexible and generative than has been widely assumed. This panel examines the far-reaching implications of the understanding that artists from across the stylistic and ideological spectrum were productively imbricated in the calculated opacities and unlikely rapprochements of the ‘actually existing’ artworlds of socialism. Discussion of the specific traits of Eastern bloc artworlds and the key differences between art institutional landscapes across the Cold War divide opens onto the critical question as to what might be salvaged from the historical experience of art under socialism. Furthermore, if post-socialism is conceived not as a timeless category but as a specific historical period, then what are the prospects for the socialist project in the new social and political circumstances of unfolding global disorder?

IAS Book Launch: Another Artworld Was Possible - the Socialist Art System Revisited

by Avril Alba, Yasmin Khan, and Tom Lawson. Chaired by Tamar Garb.

This panel discussion was jointly organised by the IAS and the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), and was part of the GHIL's Contested Histories seminar series (summer term 2019). Please find the programme here and the poster here.

This panel asked how do colonial history, the Second World War, and the Holocaust intersect? As Britain embarks on the creation of a National Holocaust Memorial, calls have been made for a memorial to and a museum of Britain’s historical involvement in slavery, its colonial past, and their legacies. Meanwhile, scholarship such as Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory has argued that Holocaust remembrance also has the potential to open up routes for commemorating other contested national pasts. This panel enabled a dialogue between scholars of the Holocaust, colonialism, and the British Empire to reflect on national and transnational legacies.

Multidirectional Memory? National Holocaust Memorials and (Post-)Colonial Legacies

by Chris Knight (Anthropology, UCL)and Jackie Walker. Chaired by Tamar Garb (IAS)

With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam war period.

Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand – and change – our world. According to The New York Times, Chomsky ‘may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today.’

This book revisits ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century on. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book finishes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its 50th anniversary.

IAS Book Launch: The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Elisabeth Lebovici, art historian and art critic offers a response from the context of her book – ‘Being There – AIDS Activism at the end of Twentieth Century’. This is part of a Preview Seminar: Protest - Remembering Derek Jarman, that marked the 25th anniversary of Jarman’s death and reflects on What Jarman’s legacy is, as an artist and activist, today? Special guests come together to discuss the creative worlds, controversies and friendships that surround Jarman’s pioneering - interdisciplinary practice.

TRACK 7: Seminar Programme - Part Two / Protest, Outrage & Remembrance
Elisabeth Lebovici, art historian and art critic; Being There – AIDS Activism at the end of Twentieth Century.  Lebovici offers a wider perspective on the global struggles against HIV/AIDS, and its integration into art histories, discourses and practices - as an important framework to consider Jarman’s activist and artistic legacy.
About Speaker
Elisabeth Lebovici is an art historian and art critic, whose research, writings and lectures investigate the intersection of feminism, gender studies, queer politics, LGBTQ activism, and contemporary art. Among numerous publications, she is the author, of a new book Ce que le sida m’a fait: art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle (What AIDS has done to me. Art and Activism at the End of the 20th Century) Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2017. The book restores the voices of friends in the fight against AIDS; articulating the “I” and the “we” of then and now; examining facts and affects little known to the French and European public; analysing the epidemic of representation which followed the emergence of AIDS: such is the agenda of this book, conceived by Lebovici as a “discourse on method” in which the personal is always political, and public and private spheres are closely intertwined. Engaged alongside French and American AIDS activists, Elisabeth Lebovici was a privileged observer, as an art historian and journalist, of the debates of the 1980s and 1990s.

Further Information
A range of iconic works were explored in the context of the highly anticipated IMMA exhibition, Derek Jarman, PROTEST! that opened on 15 November 2019. This significant retrospective offers the timely opportunity to explore many interdisciplinary aspects of Jarman’s life and work. Through Jarman’s work, the seminar traces key social, political and cultural shifts of the period 1960 – 1990s. Exploring many of the socially volatile topics that charged Jarman’s activities, his feelings of alienation, associations with the punk movement, and protests by intellectuals against the repressive totalitarian state of Thatcher England and Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act. Through the continuum of ‘Protest’ , topics of exploration include: Painting and Life; Memoir and Writing; the HIV / AIDS crisis; Stigma and Cultural memory; Protest and Personal Freedom and LGBTQ activism.

Speakers included: Sean Kissane (Curator, IMMA); Olivia Laing (author / writer, UK); Elisabeth Lebovici (art historian, critic, France): Dr Robert Mills (Professor, Medieval Studies, UCL, UK): Charlie Porter (writer, Turner Prize Juror, UK); Richard Porter (artist / Pilot Press, UK); Jon Savage (writer, broadcaster, UK); Dr Catherine Silverstone (Reader, Queen Mary University of London); Peter Tatchell (Human rights campaigner, UK), Karim White (Thames & Hudson Publishing, UK) and Tonie Walsh (LGBT rights activist, journalist, Ireland). Invited curators, artists, writers, educators and activists share their views on Jarman’s contemporary relevance and the precarious cycle of politics today.
This seminar took place on 14 November 2019 at IMMA. Return to the dedicated playlist ‘SEMINAR PROTEST - REMEMBERING DEREK JARMAN’, to listen back to other speaker’s responses and presentations.
Image Credits: Derek Jarman. Courtesy Basilisk Communications Ltd

SEMINAR: PROTEST - REMEMBERING DEREK JARMAN (7) / Elisabeth Lebovici

The IAS is a space dedicated to intellectual freedom where disruptive thinking is not only allowed but encouraged and supported. It is a centre of advanced research, debate and dialogue across any kind of boundary, intellectual or institutional. It’s a forum where difficult, even intractable, social questions can be exposed to the scrutiny of rigorous critical enquiry from a variety of perspectives

This Soundcloud channel showcases content produced by the Institute of Advanced Studies and its research centres.

Note on the logo: the blue and green background is a detail of a banner (300x120cm; oil paint, oil pastel and compressed charcoal on canvas) that artist Lucile Haefflinger produced for and which is on display at the IAS.

Everyone is Present - Terry Kurgan in conversation with Tamar Garb and Eva Hoffman

UCL Institute of Advanced Studies