Art History Lectures

Jordan Wolfson discusses 'Raspberry Poser' with Esther Leslie, writer and Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London.

Jordan Wolfson in conversation with Esther Leslie 29/11/13

Poet Susan Howe and musician/composer David Grubbs perform the most recent work, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, the fourth of their collaborative performed sound-works.

A tapestry of resonant sounds crafted from voice, piano, and manipulated field recordings, this collaboration grows from a wide bibliography that includes the 2010 exhibition Paul Thek: Diver; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s writings; nineteenth century texts by Edward Clodd and Robert Browning; The Later Affluence of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens by Edward Clarke; Tom Tit Tot; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among many other sources. “The bibliography is the medium,” Howe has said in explaining her poems. Finding, cutting, collaging, and weaving together idioms and the distinctiveness of each word generate her tightly clipped syntax-shifting phrasings meant to be understood visually and textually in equal measure. That taut, cleaved process also allows room for chance influences, such as additional material found during Howe’s residency in 2012 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

To the already distinctly angled language of Howe on the page, Grubbs uses his ever attentive ear for aural nuance and fissure to build sound fields abutting, moving through, and enveloping Howe’s recitations.This many layered sound is accomplished by previously recording Howe, manipulating the recordings, and combining both alongside Susan reading in performance. What results is the concrete sounds of a procession leading vested encounters with documents, languages near and far, the sedimentary layers of ink on various papers in hands, and the whirring, resonant sounds of enunciation and exhalation.

David Grubbs first worked alongside Susan Howe in 2005 for Thiefth, made at the behest of the Cartier Foundation, Paris. This and two more works, Souls of the Labadie Tract (2008) and Frolic Architecture (2011), have been recorded and released via Blue Chopsticks.

Susan Howe and David Grubbs / Paul Thek / Processions (1977)

Intertextual Hybridity and Artistic Re-creation: Indigenous Cosmologies on Film

Dr Charlotte Gleghorn, The University of Edinburgh

SEMINAR 1. The University of Edinburgh, Friday 3 October 2014

Intertextual Hybridity and Artistic Re-creation:... - Charlotte Gleghorn

Session One, Panel 1: The Concept of Hybridity in Conflicts

Chair: Dr Neville Bolt, Director, KCSC

• Prof. David Betz, KCSC; Professor of War in the Modern World, KCL 
‘Military and Non-military means in Modern Warfare’ (0-27 min) 

• Prof. Georgy Filimonov, Head of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Predictions at RUDN University. 
‘Hybrid War: Interpretations and Reality’ (27-59 min)

Session One, Panel 1: The Concept Of Hybridity In Conflicts

‘Same difference: constructive ambiguity and contemporary art from post-conflict Northern Ireland’ by Dr Declan Long (NCAD).

This podcast features the inaugural lecture in a new UCD Humanities Institute Research Series: ‘Media, Encounter, Witness: Troubling Pasts’. The lecture, ‘Same difference: constructive ambiguity and contemporary art from post-conflict Northern Ireland’, was given by Dr Declan Long from the National College of Art and Design. 

The event took place in the UCD Humanities Institute on the 13 October, 2017. ‘Media, Encounter, Witness: Troubling Pasts’ is led by Emilie Pine, Associate Professor in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film; and Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor in the UCD School Of Art History & Cultural Policy, who also introduced the lecture.

Podcasting by https://soundcloud.com/real-smart-media

http://www.ucd.ie/humanities/research/mediaencounterwitnesstroublingpasts/

Download

Declan Long - Constructive ambiguity and contemporary art from post-conflict Northern Ireland

ANNI ALBERS AND THE MODERNIST TEXTILE
26-27 January 2019
University College London
www.annialbersmodernisttextile.com

DAY 1
1. Briony Fer, Introduction
2. Grant Watson, Bauhaus Imaginista: Learning From
3. Tanya Harrod, ‘the living texture’: British women weavers and modern textiles in the 1920s and 1930s
4. Gabriela García de Cortázar, Andean Anni, or what to do in Chile when you are not ill
5. Ana Elena Mallet, Modernist Women and Mexico as inspiration. Anni Albers + Clara Porset + Cynthia Sargent
6. Lynne Cooke, Lineage and Legacy
7. David Batchelor, The psychogeometry of triangular repeats
8. Tom McDonough, Knots and the fabric of architecture
9. Caroline Arscott, Morris: Weaving as Prophecy
10. Rye Holmboe, Anna Freud's Loom
11. Briony Fer in conversation with Helen Molesworth
12. Giulia Smith, Mary Martin’s Textiles
13. Cadence Kinsey, In formation: pattern, code and being
DAY 2
14. Briony Fer, Samples, experiments, prototypes
15. Karis Medina, Warp Families: The common threads of Anni Albers’s Pictorial Weavings
16. Mona Schieren, Transcultural Entanglements in Lenore Tawney’s Fiber Art
17. Marta Zboralska, 'As organic as nature itself': Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro’s Bauhaus
18. Meret Kaufmann, Pattern is a teacher
19. Freya Field-Donovan, Albers and Deren

This project was made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Meret Kaufmann - Pattern is a Teacher

Briony Fer - Samples, Experiments, Prototypes

Cadence Kinsey - In Formation: Pattern, Code and Being

Briony Fer and Helen Molesworth in Conversation

Tom McDonough - Knots and the Fabric of Architecture

Briony Fer - Introduction

Nancy K. Miller is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature and teaches in the M.A. Program in Women's and Gender studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, My Brilliant Friends (Columbia University Press, 2019), which tells the story of the deep friendships she formed with Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook — colleagues in the academy who tragically passed away between 2001 and 2007. During the writing of the book, Miller is confronted with her own mortality when she is diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer — perhaps confronting the end of her life without her dear friends. These friendships are complicated and interlocking, foundational to Miller’s life and her identities as a scholar and as a feminist, which were forged at the beginning of second-wave feminism during the 1970s.

The Thought Project - Episode 46 - Interview with Nancy K. Miller

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

The History of Emotions: Promises, Projects and Achievements by Professor Ute Frevert, Director, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin,

Ute Frevert is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Between 2003 and 2007 she was professor of German history at Yale University and prior to that she taught History at the Universities of Konstanz, Bielefeld and the Free University in Berlin.

Her research interests include the history of the emotions, social and cultural history of modern times, gender history and political history. Ute Frevert is honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the British Academy, and serves on several scientific boards. She was awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize in 1998 and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2016.

Ute Frevert - The History of Emotions: Promises, Projects and Achievements

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

This podcast features a lecture by Monique Scheer, Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen.

Her lecture, Emotions as Cultural Practices: A Challenging Perspective, took place on November 15 2019 and was organised in partnership with the Architecture and Narrative project and the UCD Humanities Institute. Professor Scheer was introduced by Dr Katherine Fama from the UCD School of English, Drama and Film.

Description
Moving from physiological to cognitivist to neuroscientific understandings of what emotions are, the history of emotions is now engaging more intensely with approaches that seek to bridge the divide between mind and body. This has methodological consequences: what are we looking for in the sources, what is worthy of interpretation? This lecture will discuss these challenges, how the notion of “emotion as a kind of practice” has been received in recent years, and where we might go from here.

Prof. Monique Scheer is Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, where she also serves as Vice-President for International Affairs. She has co-authored Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling (Oxford University Press, 2014) and is currently completing a monograph on the cultural history of enthusiasm.

The seminar was organised in partnership with the Architecture and Narrative project and the UCD Humanities Institute.

Monique Scheer - Emotions as Cultural Practices: A Challenging Perspective

Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism (2009, Zero Books) and lecturer at Goldsmiths and University of East London, presents a talk in which he asks the question: ‘Can anything genuinely new emerge in a political landscape that is clogged with ideological junk?’

This event accompanied Hito Steyerl's exhibition at Chisenhale.

Art History Lectures

Yates Norton