2023/2024 Fine Arts Speaker Series

Essay: "Romancing the Looky-Loos"

What do they all mean - the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life--with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy--despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives "add up to something." Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory--with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary--is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

Taking the Matter into Common Hands maps out the issues surrounding collaborative art from a practitioner's perspective. With contributions from Marion von Osten, Nav Haq, 16 Beaver, Copenhagen Free University, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson, it examines the working relations between artists and other producers of culture, and explores the future of collective action in the art world. In recent years, the art world has shown a renewed interest in collective work and activity. Collaborations between artists and artists, artists and curators, and artists and outside professionals have begun to rival the traditional focus on the individual artist. This type of collaboration has called into question how we view works of art that are not the voice of a single individual, and how that impacts on the concept of art as a means of self-expression. Taking the Matter Into Common Hands is essential for both academics, practitioners and lay audiences alike 47 colour & b/w illustrations

A lively investigation into ethnographic practice.   Richly illustrated, Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects reflects on the experimental skills and practices shared by ethnographers and curators. Francisco Martínez highlights relationships between contemporary art, design, and anthropology and imagines creative ways to develop new infrastructure that supports vital interdisciplinary work. Attentive to the experimental nature of exhibitions, Martínez models a new approach to both ethnography and objecthood across disciplinary boundaries.  

A unique look at the visionary artist, educator and activist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). 'I state, without hesitation or reserve, that I consider Ruth Asawa to be the most gifted, productive, and originally inspired artist that I have ever known personally' R. Buckminster Fuller, 1971 Although less known outside North America, Japanese-American artist Ruth Asawa is an artist of vital importance to modern art. Ruth Asawa: Citizen of the Universe, which accompanies the first exhibition of Asawa's work to be staged in public galleries in Europe, introduces European audiences to both Asawa's powerful art - including her signature hanging sculptures in looped and tied wire - and her pioneering education practice. It positions her expansive ethos - her self-identification as 'a citizen of the universe' and belief that art education can be life enriching for everyone - as a catalyst for creative forward-thinking in the 21st century. Focusing on a dynamic and formative period in her life from 1945 to 1980, this book gives readers a unique experience of the artist and her work, exploring her legacy from a European perspective and positioning her as an abstract sculptor crucial to American modernism. It is a wonderful celebration of her holistic integration of art, education and community engagement, through which she called for a revolutionary and inclusive vision of art's role in society.

A stimulating narrative and reference resource that guides the reader through the most significant symbols from worldwide art history. Why do we reach for the red rose on Valentine's day? Where did the owl gain its reputation for wisdom? Why should you never trust a fox? In this visual tour through art history, Matthew Wilson pieces together a global visual language enshrined in art: the language of symbols. Symbols exert a strong hold in the image-saturated 21st century, and have done so for thousands of years. From national emblems to corporate logos and emojis, our day-to-day lives abound with icons with roots in the distant past. Expert art historian Matthew Wilson traces the often surprising trajectories that symbols have taken through history, from their original purposes to their modern meanings, identifying the common themes and ideas that link seemingly disparate cultures. Thus we meet the falcon as a symbol of authority from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to the medieval aristocracy; the dog as stalwart companion from the classical era to the Renaissance; and the mythical phoenix as a symbol of female power connecting a queen in England with a goddess in China. We also see moments of radical reinterpretation and change: the transformation of the swastika from an auspicious symbol of hope to one of hate. From Palaeolithic cave paintings to contemporary installations, Wilson deftly guides us through this world of symbols, showcasing their enduring ability to express power, hope, fear and faith, and to create and communicate identities, uniting - or dividing - the people that made them.

Some of the most relevant art of the present is conceived through investigating and retelling history in new ways, by artists who engage with the past as a means to repair histories of violence and reconnect with undervalued cultural legacies. Meshes of Time presents artworks that find their poetic and political vitality by mobilizing histories of Latin America. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the publication presents artworks by contemporary Latin American artists who, over the last four decades, have looked to history as the source material for new work. Videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures, many of which were donated to the Museum by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in 2018, are presented in dialogue with one another. Organized into three thematic sections, the catalogue examines how artists have investigated and reimagined histories and cultural legacies of the region, including long histories of colonialism in the region, undervalued cultural and visual heritages, and inherited and chosen kinships, as well as processes around mourning and memorialization. The richly illustrated catalogue features over 40 artists from different generations working across Latin America over the last four decades, including Alejandro Cesarco (Uruguay), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Mario García Torres (Mexico), Leandro Katz (Argentina), Suwon Lee (Venezuela), Gilda Mantilla (Peru) and Raimond Chaves (Colombia), Cildo Meireles (Brazil), Rosângela Rennó (Brazil), Mauro Restiffe (Brazil), and José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia), among others.

Anthropology and Art Practice takes an innovative look at new experimental work informed by the newly-reconfigured relationship between the arts and anthropology. This practice-based and visual work can be characterised as 'art-ethnography'. In engaging with the concerns of both fields, this cutting-edge study tackles current issues such as the role of the artist in collaborative work, and the political uses of documentary. The book focuses on key works from artists and anthropologists that engage with 'art-ethnography' and investigates the processes and strategies behind their creation and exhibition. The book highlights the work of a new generation of practitioners in this hybrid field, such as Anthony Luvera, Kathryn Ramey, Brad Butler and Karen Mizra, Kate Hennessy and Jennifer Deger, who work in a diverse range of media - including film, photography, sound and performance. Anthropology and Art Practice suggests a series of radical challenges to assumptions made on both sides of the art/anthropology divide and is intended to inspire further dialogue and provide essential reading for a wide range of students and practitioners.

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity. This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.