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Writing to Barnett Newman: F. N. Souza and the End of Modernism
Get PDFThe thesis identifies and interrogates the development of a historical sensibility in the
work of artists in post-war New York. It argues that scholars’ marginalisation of this question
is behind wider failures to account for the development of modern painting, from the limited debates about painting’s ‘return’ in the 1980s (foundered on the question of identity) up to
the present day. I ask why, in the decades following World War II, so many painters appeared
to forsake aims of progress and innovation, calling instead for some form of return to the
highpoints of pre-war modernism. Writing in the 1960s, F.N. Souza railed against abstract expressionism and pop art for ‘giving up after Picasso’. A decade earlier Grace Hartigan
made the same point: ‘Why must I go on from Picasso?’. Such postures have always looked
regressive: critics at the time dismissed them for misrecognising the advances of abstract painting, for abandoning optical integrity, for reintroducing illusion, content, memory, or space. Even in the 1970s and later, once the high modernist consensus had been overturned, they still looked reactionary. Modernist painting was transformed over these decades. It achieved definitive theoretical and historical formulation as a continuous tradition stretching
back over 100 years. The term ‘modernism’ entered general use; the great permanent
American collections acquired their definitive forms and were opened to the public. But this
newly imagined tradition quickly came under attack for the exclusionary and prescriptive
operations it implied. The artists I analyse have seemed to fall between the horns of this
divide: neither moving modernism forward, nor departing from it. Even at the time, they were accused of following fashion rather than innovating. Neither side of the debate has had much
use for them (it is difficult to decide who out of Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss
expressed stronger dislike for Hartigan and Joan Mitchell). They have seemed too proximate, too static, too rooted in the achievements of the immediate past.
I think this has things the wrong way round. What shows up in the critical record and
subsequent scholarship as regression, belatedness, or anachronism often in practice worked in opposite directions. Artists used demands for conformity to an imagined tradition to interrogate and intervene in modernism’s histories while these were still under construction. They did not need to share a common aesthetic or political programme. No manifestoes here. They did not even have to look similar. Many were unaware of one another’s existence. What matters is that each of them came in different ways to conceive of the history of modernist painting as something huge, definite, and unavoidable, but at the same time to see in that
rigidity a source of renewed creativity and critical engagement. Each looked towards history as a source of engagement with the present. As in the various re-stagings of Picasso’s 'Demoiselles d’Avignon' (1907; itself, of course, a crossing-point for multiple traditions)
carried out by Hartigan in the 1950s, Souza in the 1960s, and Robert Colescott in the 1980s,
they actively diverted and reshaped these histories, turning such reflection into the material
for continued painterly practice. The conditions for this kind of reorientation were historically
unprecedented, grounded in the situation of the post-war United States: the advancing
globalisation of the capitalist economy; the institutionalisation of modernist painting as
official high culture; the political and intellectual climate of the Cold War; movements for
decolonisation and advancing US neocolonialism; the demands for Civil Rights. Each of my
chapters analyses a cluster of such framing factors, the legacies of which are still with us
today
Human curiosities in contemporary art and their relationship to the history of exhibiting monstrous bodies
Get PDFThis thesis analyses the representation of so-called human curiosities in recent visual art, by drawing a connection to historical practices of exhibiting 'monstrous' and deformed bodies within institutions such as freak shows, anatomical collections and medical museums. The last two decades have witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in the histories of these institutions, particularly through the work of Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rachel Adams, Richard Sandell and Samuel J.M.M Alberti, whose research can be situated in interdisciplinary humanities fields such as disability studies, museology, history of science and literary and visual studies. Concurrently, a remarkable number of contemporary artists have also turned to the history and imagery of these spaces to explore the politics of display in exhibitions of non-normative bodies. This study addresses the critical gap between these two parallel domains of inquiry, drawing upon recent studies concerning historical exhibitions of monstrous bodies to analyse how contemporary artists have simultaneously confronted and extended these traditions through their artworks. In order to show that the very notion of 'monstrous bodies' is inextricably bound up in the curious display practices that frame them, I analyse the representation of human curiosities in the work of Zoe Leonard, Joanna Ebenstein, Diane Arbus, Mat Fraser, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Marc Quinn and John Isaacs. Each chapter examines a distinct institutional context – the anatomical collection, the freak show, the art gallery, and the contemporary medical museum – to investigate how these artists challenge the meanings conferred upon extraordinary bodies within each space, bestowing new significance upon these forms within the context of their various art practices. I argue that, by doing so, artists themselves can take on roles like curious collectors, freak show talkers and teratologists, revealing the potential for 'art' to act as yet another display framework that imposes a particular set of meanings onto anomalous bodies
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Sculpture: Some observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream by Johann Gottfried Herder
No full textThis is the first complete English language translation of Herder's book 'Sculpture', originally published in 1778. It includes an extensive editor's introduction to Herder's thought, detailed explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text
Empty garden : A liminoid journey to nowhere in somewhere
Get PDFThis thesis offers interconnected reflections on the liminal space called a garden—the boundary space between nature and the man-made—and the liminoid experience found there. It explores various sensory experiences a person might have while walking through an East Asian garden and its possible equivalent, a contemporary art installation.
In terms of the form of my thesis, I chose the scroll, and scrolling, to present various forms of writing that can reflect the complex experience of an East Asian garden, in the hope that in wandering through my writings a complex and disconnected liminal and liminoid experience might unfold. The term ‘liminoid’ is defined by anthropologist Victor Turner as having characteristics of the liminal experience, but as optional, temporary and not inevitably involving the resolution of a personal crisis. If liminal is ritual, liminoid is leisure.
The Chinese landscape painting style Shan Sui is not a depiction of nature with one vanishing point, but a conceptual idea involving multiple, shifting perspectives. It seeks to capture the essence of nature and to draw out an ideal world. Similarly, the garden in East Asia is not conceived as a re-creation of nature, but as a combination of symbols pursuing a thoroughly ideological world. The fifteenth-century Korean painting, which appears at the beginning of my scroll, implies this kind of ideal through a space designated as a ‘peach garden’. The conceptual pursuit of an ideal space of nature resulted in the extreme aesthetic garden practice called Ui-won, an imaginary garden made in eighteenth-century Korea.
These precedents have allowed me to rethink the meaning of creating a ‘garden’ in relation to certain forms of contemporary practice. Lois Weinberger understands artificially transferred plants as immigrants who have been separated from their homes. He suggests that ‘letting go’ rather than cultivation makes the best garden. Tomoko Takahashi’s installations allow the viewer to reflect on sensory experience within an urban ‘landscape’ of excessive technological growth.
By reflecting on the liminal and liminoid experience of the garden, I attempt to articulate the conceptual disorientation felt in stone garden spaces and their contemporary urban equivalents. This thesis, comprising of both writing and installation works, explores the experience of liminal space informed by particular ideals evident in Shan Sui and Ui-won and manifest in East Asian gardens and in some works of contemporary art
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Affective vision: urban landscape photographs and their paratexts
Get PDFThis practice-based research project focuses on how artists use paratexts to communicate extravisual phenomena such as affect and emotion in photographs of the urban landscape. I construe these environments as ‘repositories’ of personal experiences and sociopolitical histories that only become fully apparent to the viewer through texts such as titles, captions, and artist statements.
In the first three chapters, I discuss a range of photographic practitioners, describing some critical differences between photographs that share the built environment as their subject. Then, in more extended case studies, I examine the tensions that arise when artists use paratexts to elicit affective readings of their works since this external information links the images with their biography and intentions.
In the closing sections, I offer some observations on the two photobooks that constitute the practice component of my degree. The first, Border Documents, brings together short narratives of my father’s youth in Ciudad Juárez, with recent photographs of the places where those events unfolded, in an attempt to avoid the graphic violence shown in most depictions of the city. The second, A Certain Logic of Expectations, is a psychogeographical exploration of Oxford that seeks to capture the current cultural moment of Brexit. These works share a view of everyday life as a complex matrix of interconnected events that can reveal some of the social, historical, and political idiosyncrasies of the urban environment through the combination of images and texts. As such, they can be seen as counter-narratives to the cities they depict, contesting their hegemonic reputation and foregrounding what is at stake when images reinforce cultural cliches. The conclusion reached through the different strands of this research project is that the visual indeterminacy of photography can be preserved despite the involvement of language, as long as the works avoid semantic redundancy
Modes of presence in the contemporary sculptural encounter
No full textThis thesis examines the manifestation of ‘presence’ in contemporary sculpture and the nature of the viewer’s encounter. In particular, it investigates the ways in which inert materials are transformed into objects that appear to possess life. Presence has been considered in terms of the image in different media; however, this thesis shows that a work does not have to be figurative for presence to be evoked. Through a detailed investigation of individual artworks, each of the chapters explores different ways in which presence manifests itself. The identification of diverse examples across time and place reveals unexpected similarities between modes of presence observed in ancient and religious sculpture and the practices of making and viewing art in the contemporary sculptural encounter. The thesis examines the shared agency between artist and materials, and how this manifests itself as presence; how presence operates when the site and the viewer become part of the work; and how materials are activated through specific beliefs or through an intervention made to their form or context. It aims to show that these different layers are interconnected and that together they determine the nature of presence
The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1965-1982): exhibitions, spectatorship and social change
Get PDFThis thesis examines the first seventeen years of the history of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (MOMA), from its founding in 1965 until c. 1982. It is concerned with the changing relationships between the museum and its audience, focusing on those aspects of the museum's programming that shed light on its role as a public mediator of recent art. This provides a means to consider the underlying values and commitments that informed MOMA's emergence as a leading contemporary art institution. Chapter one examines the museum’s relationship to utopian countercultures through the metaphor of the museum as 'garden'; chapter two considers the erstwhile 'permanent' collection and its connection to corporate patronage; chapter three investigates the parallel forces of institutional critique and institutionalization; and chapter four addresses didactic strains in the museum’s representation of an emergent multiculturalism. Although dedicated to the history of a single regional gallery, the thematic structure of the thesis provides entry points into historical and theoretical issues of broader relevance. It is based on primary research in the previously neglected archive of what is now known as Modern Art Oxford, supplemented by interviews with artists and former staff members, and by close attention to British art periodicals and exhibition catalogues of the period. It is also informed by critical writings on museums and displays, and by artistic, social and museological histories, allowing the museum's activities to be situated within the cultural politics of these turbulent decades. The thesis suggests that institutional identity – as exemplified by the history of MOMA from 1965-1982 – is porous and discontinuous: the development of the museum over this period is animated by multiple and often contradictory ideals, continuously shaped by pragmatic considerations, and subject to a rich variety of subjective responses
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