Research in the School of Creative Arts

The TVAD Research Group is just one of several research groups in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. Staff move freely between groups examining Contemporary Arts Practice, Design Research, Media Research and the Digital Hack Lab as well as TVAD. Read more about the groups on our website here: https://www.herts.ac.uk/apply/schools-of-study/creative-arts/creative-arts-research

Some of our researchers were interviewed last year about their work and its significance for a film made by Freddie Gerrard-Abbott with Jak Kimsey and Antoine Proust. This film introduces the research of Dr Dan Goodbrey, Dr Pat Simpson, Dr Silvio Carta, Kim Akass, Prof Marty St James, Dr Steven Adams, Prof Simeon Nelson and Prof Grace Lees-Maffei. Hear them talking about their research in this film:

Research in the School of Creative Arts: An Overview from School of Creative Arts on Vimeo.

Find out more about TVAD's researchers, including Dan Goodbrey, Pat Simpson, Silvio Carta, Steven Adams and Grace Lees-Maffei on the TVAD researcher profile pages here: Link

The 'Pursuit of Luxury' continues...

One of our colleagues in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, Dr Shaun Borstrock, is working with TVAD research Dr Steven Adams to co-convene another conference as part of the 'In Pursuit of Luxury' project, with Dr Veronica Manlow, Associate Professor at Brooklyn College in the School of Business. It will be held on May 6 2016 in New York at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, 65 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016. The convenors will be joined on the steering commitee by Prof Eugenia Paulicelli of CUNY. The conference team has this week opened the Call for Papers.

The 'In Pursuit of Luxury' conference provides an opportunity for academia and industry to come together to discuss issues that have a key impact on the global luxury and luxury brand market. The conference provides a platform to examine and expand understanding of the concepts of luxury and to provide a refreshing context to the debates surrounding the subject. Dr Borstrock and fellow commentators aim to take a critical look at a range of issues, some well-established, others neglected. This provides a focus for the exploration of luxury's past, present and future. This year's theme is around commercial and academic perspectives on luxury.

The idea of luxury has secured a place in modern western culture as the term is part of common parlance. This conference will aim to explore the many issues and debates surrounding the idea of luxury. When and where did the concept of luxury emerge? What is its history? How does luxury relate to social class? Is luxury necessarily the preserve of the few and, if so, what are the qualifications to consume luxurious objects? How important is social status v the accumulation of money in luxury acquisition? How does an object or experience acquire luxury status? Is it through branding or high quality materials and craftsmanship? Is it possible to mass-produce luxury, and, if so, what are the ethical implications of this? In a global world of mass consumption, is luxurious consumption becoming politically and/or ethically suspect? Similarly, as the world's resources diminish, might we expect the political implications of conspicuous consumption to take on greater resonance? And, not least, what is the future of luxury in a world beset with financial turmoil? All of these questions stack up to make for a subject of pressing concern and febrile debate.

For the Second International 'In Pursuit of Luxury' conference we will consider work within the field of luxury which encompasses established firms with a long heritage, from conglomerates to small independent firms, to "new" luxury, and emerging models with innovative practices. How is the industry structured with respect to work, what hierarchies are in place, and how do people in a variety of positions from professional to service and labour classifications experience their day to day reality? What is it like to work behind the scenes in ateliers, factories, in facilities, and in support functions such as technology and research? How do those who work on the front lines with the public perform their roles and how do they relate to corporate directives?

The irony of the "democratization" of luxury is subject to analysis as is the mythologisation of labour, upheld by marketing, media and public relations where ground level operations in stores are spectacularised while production, which happens a layer below the surface, is obscured. It is at the level of production where artisans practice their craft and where others perform labour. It is here that costs may be cut the most, workers deskilled and labour subject to the logic of scientific management. It is also the point at which artisans and factory workers alike may be integrated into the culture and philosophy of the company in a way that enriches their lives.

How sustainable is a luxury model dictated to by fashion and business, which requires ever larger segments of the global population to consume and produce luxury, in faster cycles? What are the costs of continuing along this trajectory, and indeed what are the forces that create and fulfil the desire for luxury, and that uphold its existence in a variety of incarnations along a continuum stretching from the bespoke and rarefied to "new" luxury?

To submit an abstract, visit the project website at http://www.herts.ac.uk/in-pursuit-of-luxury/conference-2015/abstract-submission. For abstract submission enquiries please email us at: abstracts@inpursuitofluxury.com

For general enquiries, please email us at: info@inpursuitofluxury.com

For sponsorship information please contact Nicholas Thomas at: n.thomas9@herts.ac.uk

More information is available on the project website http://www.herts.ac.uk/in-pursuit-of-luxury

 

on writing differently ...

Bedfellows: the time and matter of two fake deaths

“At about 11 a.m. ET on Friday (September 25, 2015), our beloved director Woody Allen passed away. Woody Allen was born on December 1, 1935 in New York. He will be missed but not forgotten. Please show your sympathy and condolences by commenting on and liking this page.”

Facebook page to commemorate the death of Woody Allen …   http://en.mediamass.net/people/woody-allen/deathhoax.html

The subject of this text arose from an afternoon in the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the summer of 2015 and the opportunity to look at and write about art with which I was unfamiliar. With it came the chance to write in a different way to normative historical writing, to write mainly about art’s formal components – its capacity to mean something just through the selection of the raw stuff at the artists’ disposal - without too much recourse to textual sources, and to think about the interstices between art and writing.  

The first of the two works in question is anonymous, a small, finely crafted, sixteenth century terracotta made in France in the sixteenth century showing the death – or more specifically, the dormition - of the Virgin Mary. The other, more recent, much larger picture also shows another immanent death. Here, blood pours from the head of an anonymous prone male figure as he seemingly breathes his last. The picture measures around two by three metres and was made in 1970 by the twentieth century American painter, Philip Guston.

On reflection, the two works were part of a curious calculus: they had something in common and where they had nothing in common, they really had nothing in common at all, each respectively repelling and attracting the other with the force of their own similarity and difference. In this sense, they were, both literally and figuratively, bedfellows, two characters caught napping in once different and now similar circumstances, both brought together by the redemptive cloak of art. (In this sense we might see the museum as misericordia, doing the job of the Virgin’s gown, offering sanctuary to the myriad pictures that gather within.) 

Let’s start with a striking similarity. Neither of the two subjects is really dead. According to Catholic doctrine, the Virgin Mary doesn’t die; she simply enters a period of suspended existence, a sleep or dormition. We know this because she is conceived without concupiscence and at her passing from this world sleeps uncorrupted before ascending a few weeks later to her Son’s side, whereupon she assumes the role of Queen of Heaven, Christ’s bride. Her course from one condition to the other is cat’s cradle like in its theology and is discussed at length by the early Christian Fathers. It gets taken up again by theologians in sixteenth century France and Germany, and it is upon this reference that our dormition draws.

At the exact moment shown in the Metropolitan’s terracotta, Mary is largely of this world rather than the next, an old woman, her face drawn and wrinkled. But the next world clearly beckons. Time, space and matter are already buckling under the weight of the prescience of this event, a buckling that shapes and twists the terracotta. Mary is given notice of her passage into heaven by the same angel who announces her pregnancy and in this her final moment all but one of the Apostles – Thomas –  take time out of their Pentecostal mission to rally to her bedside. They come from far and wide and arrive with miraculous speed. Each somehow finds his space around Mary’s bed, twisting in an out of the pliable clay interior, pushing bedposts, arches and pilasters to find sufficient room. Over time, even the clay struggles to keep pace as it too cracks and the components of the picture warp. We have, then, within the dormition a doubled time: the twisting time of the event itself (the mustering of Apostles and angels) and the material time of the clay as it dries and twists over its six hundred year history. Not least we have the doubled time of the spectator: the time of the Catholic Church and now the time of art. 

Like the Virgin, Guston’s subject is also in some form suspended state but we know this only from clues in the picture rather than religious dogma. The picture is ambiguously titled Stationery Figure. It is not moving. Despite its thanatosic pose, the figure is clearly living. It draws on a cigarette, the intake of oxygen making the tip glow red while a small, cartoon like cloud of smoke hovers above. (By way of a theological footnote, the late Apostle Thomas was said to have arrived late at the Virgin’s bedside on a cloud such as this.) Our second figure, then, is not dead but acting badly, playing possum, a stage corpse taking time out between scene changes. A hint of the time of the event is given by the clock in the picture’s background: it seems to take place in the early hours of the morning – sometime before 1.30 a.m. - although the calibrations on the clock face are difficult to read. At least fourteen divisions can be seen and some are partially eclipsed by the prone figure. It is also possible to see the night sky through a small window in the picture’s background. In this sense, then, the Virgin and the Stationery Figure are both poised on a chronological margin: poised waiting in a backstage time of a suspended performance.

 

What of the two works’ facture? The dormition is made with evident skill. The clay is pressed into describing the event in painstaking detail from the texture of Mary’s skin to the decorative detail on the pitcher by her bedside, from the carefully delineated pages of a Gospel to the ionic pilaster visible behind the bedpost to the right. The artist of the dormition also knows his art history: the images of the Apostles take their lead from various forms of Roman portraiture, some classical and idealising, others more realistic. The Apostle on the far left  looks like a pugnacious Vespasian from the first century when Romans gave up idealism. In stark contrast to the level of detail, skill and labour invested in the Dormition, Guston seems to know nothing. His work is crude, clumsily drawn, badly painted and poorly composed. There is nothing in the selection of colours – pinks, whites, greys and reds - that could possibly suggest any hint of harmony, informed selection or taste. However, this may also be a choice conditioned by the time of another dormition. These are the colours of the slaughterhouse, the colours of greying fat, blood and flesh, not of decomposition but not of life either.  This is the matter of death as it is caught between a moment, the absence of life and the point of putrefaction. If this is the case, we can quickly find our way back to the dormition because these are the colours so abjured by Mary’s immaculate condition. We have, then, flesh in two kinds of suspended animation, one immaculate, the other the death of the freezer cabinet. Again, the two figures are both inscribed with a new kind of time, a time of suspension.

There are also curious connections in the two works’ composition. In step with Guston’s wilfully clumsy drawing, is an equally clumsy composition. Components of the picture make way for one another flattening the picture into a relief.  The bulb, the light switch, the smoke, hand and window find space for one another in a way with which the sculptor of the dormition might again sympathise. On closer inspection the body doesn’t eclipse the clock face, the clock presses onto the body: time weighs on Guston’s figure.  

Although the two works have something in common – they share comparable subjects, they address the subject of time, and not least, they are both art - the contexts from which they draw their references are very different. The Dormition takes as its point of reference from the spiritual preoccupations of the northern European late medieval world, one in which intense spiritually is articulated through close observation. By contrast, Guston’s world is one largely of his own making and his point of reference is not art by way of theology – but art for art, prepositionally turned in on itself like most of the art in the Met and most art in museums. There are clues to what is going on but we need to look back at Guston’s troubled course through American art to find them. In the 1930s and 40s, he made the transition from a socially and politically engaged figurative art to Abstract Expressionism. The final part of his career marked a return to figurative art for which his was vilified by many art critics and it is in his early work that we can start to find some points of iconographical reference: an interest in surreal forms particularly in the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico. But Guston’s points of references are still largely personal; in fact, they are personal twice over: once as modernism (with its concern with art’s autonomy, its locus of meaning solely in the person of its maker) and again as a wilful personal rejection of what became American modernism’s house style - Abstract Expressionism. Guston, like his friend the author Philip Roth, were both rejected by the art establishment for injecting vulgarity into the academy. Again the offence is doubled: the picture is vulgar because of its facture - this is a horrible scene, horribly painted - and vulgar purely by way of it containing figuration at all, at least from the vantage point of a modernist aesthetic of 1970.   

By way of a conclusion another kind of time conditions our two works. Guston eventually runs out of paint. His signature rests not on the bottom of the painting – presumably the limits of the picture’s mise-en-scène - but on the lateral band of pale pink that doesn’t quite make it to the canvas’s lower edge. The dormition doesn’t quite make it either. This may be a sketch for a work in alabaster, a pliable, expressive but unforgiving medium that fixes its subject not in the transitional stuff of clay but in the dead matter of stone.  

Steven Adams

Return visit for TVAD Visiting Researcher 2014-5, Dr Javier Gimeno-Martínez!

Javier Gimeno-Martínez is Assistant Professor at the VU University Amsterdam. He holds a MA-degree in Industrial Design from the Universidad Cardenal Herrera, Valencia (Spain) and an MA-degree on Art History from the Universidad de Valencia. He got his PhD in 2006 from the KULeuven with the dissertation “The Role of the Creative Industries in the Construction of Regional/European Identities (1975-2002): Design and Fashion in Belgium and Spain.” He was a visiting scholar in the department of Design History at the Royal College of Art (London, UK) for the year 2009-2010. Dr Gimeno-Martínez’s research interests encompass design and fashion as related with consumption, gender and national identity. He has been conducting research on the shifting cultural status of industrial design and craft from the 1950s up to today with Belgium as case study, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders from 2007 to 2010. The culmination of the first three years of this research project was the seventh ICDHS conference “Design and Craft: A History of Convergences and Divergences”, organized in collaboration with Dr. Fredie Floré, which provided the opportunity for an international discussion on regional specificities as well as the impact of global processes of industrialisation. If, until now, design history has been largely dominated by the Western narratives of industrialization, then moving the focus towards non- industrial design practice might bring non-Western scholars to the forefront. Moreover, previously marginalized design histories in industrialized countries can finally get a voice. Dr Gimeno-Martínez was an Editor of the Journal of Design History from 2008-2013 and he is currently co-editing a special issue on Dutch design for that journal.

·        PROGRAMME

     THURSDAY 19^th MARCH 2015

10 am to 12 pm - Reading Group – Gallery Café

Session with TVAD and School research staff and PG students. Texts have been tabled for discussion from Dr Javier Gimeno-Martínez, Dr Barbara Brownie, Dr Steven Adams and Dr Pat Simpson. They are available to participants on request from Dr Grace Lees-Maffei g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk

  

1 pm to 3 pm - National Army Museum Project discussion, JGM, BB and SA.

  

3 pm to 4 pm, AB132 – Design Talk: ‘Design and National Identity’, Dr Javier Gimeno-Martínez

What are we talking about when we talk about British design? Or Dutch design? What is produced in the country or what is consumed in the country? Both positions are substantiated by different theoretical approaches. We must be however aware of the implications when using one or another. This talk will elaborate on these theoretical frameworks and how they can contribute to a better understanding of national design.

      FRIDAY 20^th MARCH 2015

11 AM – 4 PM TVAD SYMPOSIUM ‘Design and National Identity’ convened by Dr Grace Lees-Maffei – Room 1A161

11 am – Coffee, Welcome and ‘Introduction: Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization’, Dr Grace Lees-Maffei, Reader in Design History, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire.

Contemporary design is global. Along with international developments in higher education, the influence of post-colonial theory, and intellectual endeavours like ‘world history’, design historians are now writing Global Design History (to use the title of a 2011 edited collection). While the nation state is no longer the only socio-cultural or political-economic unit forming our identities and experiences—if it ever were—this paper examines the value of national frameworks in writing design history and asks whether moves to discard them are premature. Are national histories of design dependent upon outmoded generalisations and stereotypes? Or do they demonstrate cogent frameworks for the discussion of common socio-economic and cultural conditions and shared identities? Globalizing design history involves writing new histories of neglected regions and nations and revisionist histories informed by the findings and methods of new comparative and global histories, of celebrated industrial nations.

11.30 am - What can we learn about research methodology from the sacking of the Bastille: 2-4 pm. Tuesday 14th July 1789? Dr Steven Adams, Associate Dean Research, School of Creative Arts & Head of Research Degrees (Social Sciences Arts and Humanities Research Institute), University of Hertfordshire.

In this brief talk, I want to look at some of the methodological problems encountered in the examination of an historical event, the fall of the Bastille that marked the start of the French Revolution. In an attempt to a raft of set secondary sources on the subject to one side, I turn instead to a range of primary material - textual and material - generated in the weeks after the Bastille's fall, texts and artefacts that defy easy categorisation and perhaps test the boundaries of some normative forms of academic history, art history and design history. We are left, I suggest, with things and writing about things made and written  by citizens struggling to keep pace with the events unfolding around them. In an attempt to begin find a place for myself in these events, I turn to a set of methodological strategies from codicology and cultural studies, to existentialism, 'chronographie' and the study of necrophilia. In a nutshell, the talk attempts to bring some historical and textual fragments into the light in the same way that those who sacked the Bastille, laid its contents out for the comment and inspection of their peers in the days after the 14th of July

12.15 am – Modern Wife, Modern Life: Expectations of the 1960s Irish Housewife, Dr Ciara Meehan, Senior Lecturer in History & Associate Programme Tutor for Humanities, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire.

The Modern Wife, Modern Life exhibition opens at the National Print Museum of Ireland.  It explores representations and expectations of Irish housewives as seen in the pages of women’s magazines from the 1960s. The exhibition has been supplemented with domestic objects crowd-sourced from the Irish public. While the objects themselves are not particularly unusual, many of them had fascinating and revealing backstories. These objects are being used to construct a picture of how everyday life was experienced and understood by ‘ordinary’ women in the 1960s.

1 pm to 1.45 pm – Lunch, Provided

1.45 pm - A Special Relationship: The Transatlantic Domestic Dialogue, Dr Grace Lees-Maffei, Reader in Design History, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire.

Design History has been bounded by national borders, and yet design is local, regional, international, intranational, and global as well as national. In this presentation, I call for transnational design history, using the case study of domestic advice literature, a mediating genre which contains a wealth of information about real ideals of the consumption of design in the home. Just as manners are markers of national identity (in that the people of different countries display different behaviours) so advice literature has been a tool in the formation of national identity. For example, Sarah A. Leavitt (2002) has discussed the role of homemaking literature in the process of Americanization, turning immigrants into American citizens. But while domestic advice books have a normalizing function—a white middle class ideal is published for white middle class readers to follow—mainstream examples have largely failed to recognise the ethnic diversity of US, and UK, society. Furthermore, an insistence on national borders as borders for understanding domestic advice literature has led to erroneous chronologies based on the relatively recent introduction of domestic advice literature into US publishing when compared with its long roots in the European literary tradition. And directly after World War II, historian Arthur Schlesinger regarded etiquette literature as a channel for the maintenance of world peace, in that it could help people from different countries to understand and show respect for one another. Informal manners have been presented as an American national trait, not only in British domestic advice literature with its implied fear of Americanization, but also through claims in US-produced titles of the forging of American manners. The pre-eminent American advice writer, Emily Post. continually adapted her advice to keep pace with the informalization of American society, and yet she was ridiculed by authors of ‘the new hospitality’, Mary and Russel Wright, who saw her not as the arbiter of American etiquette, but rather as a proselytiser for English manners at odds with the needs of mid-century Americans. To understand the importance of domestic advice literature in mediating national identities, we must also recognise the transatlantic development of the genre in a ‘domestic dialogue’ between the UK and the US of several centuries standing.

2.30 pm – ‘A graphic negotiation with the past, present and future. Political devolution and the symbols of the Spanish regions (1977–1991)’, Dr Javier Gimeno-Martínez, VU University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Political devolution results in administrative institutions that are generally created anew. However, these new institutions try to conceal the brevity of their existence by reusing communal symbols from the past, such as flags or coats of arms. Even when these symbols might objectively carry certain polemical connotations, the weight of tradition can become an opportune tool for legitimating institutions, so that the past is somehow forced to conform to the present. Properly analysing this instrumentalization of historical iconography can pose quite a challenge for both historians and designers. Indeed, it is present-mindedness rather than historical perspective that drives these legitimating processes. This talk analyses the negotiation of signs by the governmental bodies that resulted from Spanish political devolution and their negotiation with both their past under Franco's dictatorship and their future in democratic Spain.  

3.15 pm – ‘Re-packing the nation: The Analysis of Ideological Symbolism in Tourist Advertising for Poland’, Dr Marta Rabikowska, Principal Lecturer in Creative Industries, Leader in Creative Employability, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire.

Dr Marta Rabikowska will present preliminary findings from her research on tourist advertising campaigns for Poland, issued after 2004 (the date of Poland’s accession to the EU). Rabikowska has published on the history of Polish advertising and the representation of gender stereotypes in Polish advertising before (2003) Rabikowska, M., ‘Female representation and dominant ideologies in Polish advertising’, East Central Europe. Vol. 30, 2, p. 39-61), which research provided the foundation to her analysis of ideological symbolism in tourist advertising affected by the intense migration movement from Poland to the EU countries in the last decade.  In this presentation, she will look into the stereotypical articulations of ‘national pride’ and ‘national treasures’ as examples of establishing a ‘new global identity’ for a nation strongly connected with the past on the one hand, and affected by contemporary migration movement and cultural exchange on the other hand.  An encounter of values and discourses, which takes place in the advertising campaign commissioned by the Polish Tourist Board (2010-2015), will be contrasted with the results of Rabikowska’s research on identity-making processes among Polish migrants living in the UK  (2009) Rabikowska, M.  & K. Burrell, 'The Material Worlds of Recent Polish Migrants: Transnationalism, Food, Shops and Home', in Kathy Burrell (ed.) Polish Migration to the UK in the 'New' European Union: After 2004,Aldershot: Ashgate, pp.211-232; Rabikowska,M.( 2010) ‘The Ritualisation of Food, Home and National Identity among Polish Migrants in London’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.  Special Issue. Ed. by Marta Rabikowska (2010) 16(3), May: 377–398), and other relevant literature on national symbolism and representation of Polish migrants in the Western media. The underlying thesis to this argument is grounded in the concept of re-appropriation of national identity in a changing historical context and in the arbitrariness of representation.

4 pm - Discussion of next steps and farewell.

For more information, contact the TVAD Research Group Leader, Dr Grace Lees-Maffei g.lees-maffei@herts.ac.uk