School of Creative Arts Research Seminars 2018/19

Now that the academic year is up and running, we are delighted to announce the Research Seminars which are happening across the academic year 2018/19 in the School of Creative Arts. Each of our four research groups, TVAD (Theorising Visual Art and Design), CAP (Contemporary Arts Practice), MRG, the Media Research Group, and DRG, the Design Research Group has contributed to a full and  rich line-up of talks and other events. The seminars are open to all, but please RSVP to Nick Thomas at the email address on the flyer, below, if you intend to join us.

Questions arising from 'Art as Research'

On 25^th June, Alana Jelinek led a workshop on the theme of art practice as research, supported with an award from Skill Up! The University of Hertfordshire’s Researcher-Led Researcher Development scheme, hosted by the University’s Researcher Development Working Group. Here are a few questions that arose from the day…

What is the difference between impact and dissemination? Catherine Tackley noted that applications for AHRC funding often make the mistake of conflating impact with dissemination or public engagement. Researchers sometimes force artificial opportunities for dissemination or engagement under the false assumption that this will improve their impact. She recommends focusing on who will benefit from the proposed research, and how they will benefit directly from the research, rather than how the research findings might be disseminated.

Tackley suggested that it was useful to think about the negative impact of a failure to fund the project. What would be lost if the research could not take place? Who would lose out if the funding was not awarded?


How dangerous is “scope creep”? Alessio Malizia warned of the dangers of mission creep, and discussed some of ways in which research scope can be narrowed. He observed that researchers, particularly at doctoral level, often start with a research question that is too large for one person to answer (or that becomes too large after the research has started). What should we do, he asks, when a research problem exceeds our individual capacities?

While “scope creep” can be problematic, for all the many reasons that Malizia identified (too broad a field of practice, too much source material to handle, etc.), is it always problematic? Scope creep can sometimes be useful, even essential, as the direction of research does need to be informed by constant reflection and re-evaluation of the research questions. In particular, Malizia touched on problems that were too big for an individual researcher, but perhaps this may sometimes be resolved not by narrowing the scope, but rather, expanding the research team. There are different ways of finding a balance between rigor and ambition, and ambitions may not need to be compromised if we find ways of extending our capacity.


Must the value of art be authenticated by academic institutions? At the end of the day Stelarc joined us to present an overview of his part works and discuss some of the themes that have underpinned his practice. He suggested that “research is the way that institutions try to authenticate practice”, but that this is problematic. Art practice and research are “two different ways of elevating the world”, and perhaps they do not always need to be combined.

Abi Spendlove: Fragments

Abi Spendlove is one of three artists who have been invited to respond to the collection of the St. Albans Museum during its period of closure. Spendlove’s project, Fragments, sees the windows and fireplaces of the St. Albans Clock Tower adorned with fragments of coloured, etched glass. The glass has been positioned at the height of the windows so that refracted sunlight falls onto the plinths and the floor below, in a fleeting display of light and colour that changes as the sun and clouds move across the sky outside.

Like Lydall Phelps, and Katy Gillam-Hull before her, Spendlove’s installation began its life as separate pieces scattered through the St. Albans Museum’s off-site store. Spendlove likens the store to an Aladdin’s cave, containing artefacts from the Roman period until the late modern period, and everything in between. She selected for her project a collection of Medieval stained glass fragments from local archeological digs, and used this glass as the model for her own work, on display in the clock tower alongside the originals.

On her first encounter with the museum’s collection, Spendlove found herself drawn to damaged fragments. She tells me, “I was particularly interested in broken objects, and how the story is enriched by the brokenness”. The museum collection is one of few contexts in which a broken fragment is treasured, and subjected to scrutiny. “The material life-cycle of objects” always involves some kind of breaking down or degrading (Crisp, 2017), through wear and tear or deliberate destruction. For many manmade objects, this is a process of “trashing and disposal”, in which the complete object is transformed from possession to trash. Archeologists and curators intervene in this process, either reviving broken objects and restoring their original form or preserving the fragment so that the memory of its form and purpose remains. It is only in this museum setting that questions are asked about the value and significance of these fragments. Museum curators, notes Spendlove, no longer take for granted that a whole object is more valuable than broken pieces. They have to decide whether an artefact “is more valuable if it is fixed or broken”. They might make a curatorial decision to fix… or it might be valued in its broken state”.

The selected fragments appeared to tell numerous stories, including stories contained within the patterns and images painted onto or etched into their surfaces, as well as the story of their fragmentation. In the museum setting, the process of breaking can form an important part of the narrative. The destruction of the object is a new chapter in its narrative, and the method of breaking can reveal a lot about the circumstances in which it was destroyed. Spendlove acknowledges her interest in the research of Lyndsay Poll Crisp (2017) who writes, “however meticulous the processes of dismantling and pulverisation… matter prevails”. The systematic destruction of cultural artefacts that took place during the Protestant Reformation left behind fragments that evidence the social and religious context of their fragmentation. The glass selected by Abi Spendlove originates from that era, having been buried underground for 400 years, preserved the memory of the Reformation until they were uncovered by archeologists in the 1970s and 80s.

Spendlove is conscious that by selecting these fragments she may have rescued them from obscurity. Archeologists are obliged to submit their finds to museums, and as a result of the sheer volume of fragments that are uncovered, many are never considered. There is a risk that they will forever remain nothing more than a number in a register, and never seen or handled again. The theme of “lost and found” emerged in Spendlove’s project, as she became aware of the potential for these fragments – found after having been lost for so long – may become lost again.

Having selected her glass fragments, Spendlove photographed them on a lightbox, traced them, and used a laser engraver to reproduce their shape and surface patterns. Her reproductions are more brightly coloured, and larger in size than the originals, so that the patterns and images are also scaled up, and details become visible that might go unnoticed in the original fragments. Separated from the rest of a complete window, these small parts of a larger pattern or image are elevated in significance. Viewers are invited to scrutinize tiny details that might have gone unnoticed in the original window, and inevitably, as the images have been disconnected from their original story, viewers can attach new fictions to these images.

Spendlove draws my attention to one particularly serendipitously arranged fragment, at the centre of which is an eye. The eye’s gaze looks significant, but taken out of context, there is no information about the subject of that gaze. The audience is left to imagine a narrative that explains the gaze, and each viewer’s story will be different.

The relationship between objects and stories was explored further in Spendlove’s workshop at the Verulamium. Participants were asked to contribute broken objects and ephemera to a “museum in a day”. Each participant was invited to complete a mock accession form, to record the story behind their object. While many of the objects were unassuming, their stories gave them great significance, and value as records of personal history. Spendlove recalls that one participant brought a sweet wrapper that had been saved since the liberation of Guernsey in 1945, when she, as a 5-year old girl, was given her first sweet. The story on the accompanying accession form describes how the girl needed to seek help to unwrap the sweet, having never seen one unwrapped before.

In another workshop, participants were invited to cut their own fragments from coloured acetate, and arrange them onto surfaces to construct their own stained glass windows. Spendlove chose to display photographs of this activity in the Clock Tower alongside her own work, and in particular she selected images that show the hands of the participants as they arrange their coloured fragments. For Spendlove, the handling of these fragments, original and reproduced, is significant. During her time spent in the Museum’s store, she became acutely aware of the fragility of the artefacts, and the wear and tear that results from handling.

The experience has taught Spendlove that “touch is a privileged thing”. To touch an object is to contribute to its destruction, particularly in a museum or archeological setting. Handling can erode the previous wear and tear that is evidence of historical interaction with the artefact. The role of the museum is conservation as well as restoration, and when they make the decision not to restore, they implicitly make the case for there being value in the evidence of damage that remains. Spendlove’s project has necessarily involved some handling of precious fragments, and the privileged position in which she has found herself, able to access and handle the museum’s artefacts, has added value to the broken pieces by adding another layer to their narrative.

Reference 
Crisp, L. P. (2017), “Michael Landy’s Break Down: Trashing and Transforming”, paper presented at TRASH, University of Vienna, 28-29 January.

In and Out of Sight: Catherine Bertola, Cath Campbell, Jo Coupe and Jennifer Douglas

Two TVAD researchers, Dr Barbara Brownie and Dr Grace Lees-Maffei, are involved with events supporting this new exhibition at UH Galleries, which runs from 18 March - 6 May 2017 in the Art and Design Gallery, College Lane, Hatfield.

UH Galleries tells us that "In and Out of Sight is a dynamic exhibition encompassing drawing, sculpture, film, installation and live works by four artists from the North East of England. Performance is the starting point for this new work and, while none of the artists  would describe themselves as performers, increasingly they are realizing the role of performance inherent in the research, making or presentation of their work."  Read more...

Get Involved:

Round Table with Catherine Bertola
Thursday 27 April, 1-2.30pm, Art and Design Gallery
Join us for an informal discussion with Catherine Bertola and historians Dr Grace Lees-Maffei and Dr Rachel Rich about the performative nature of domestic space. Booking not required. FREE!

Closing Event with Artists' Talk
Tuesday 2 May, 4-7pm, Art and Design Gallery
You are invited to a celebratory viewing of this evolving exhibition as it draws to a close. All four artists will be in conversation with writer Lizzie Lloyd from 4-5pm. Booking not required. FREE!

Read our blog! 
uhartsresident.wordpress.com
You can follow the development of the exhibition and read interviews with the artists and articles discussing the themes of the exhibition on our dedicated blog written by Dr Barbara Brownie.

Sad Bones (unknown interior #3), Catherine Bertola 2013

Copyright © 2017 UHGalleries, All rights reserved. Image courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

Contact:

UH Galleries
UH Arts 
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
United Kingdom.

One Day Artist’s Project: Body/Object/Space

On Wednesday, the Art & Design gallery was filled with oddly shaped, brightly-coloured beasts. These are the first year Fine Art students, transformed into clothed objects with guidance from visiting artist Nigel Grimmer. Students collaborated with Grimmer for his project, Body/Object/Space, using piles of clothes to become temporary, abstract sculptures. While these "body sculptures" are temporary, Grimmer stresses that they are only the first part of the making process. Participants pose for photographs, which provide a lasting record of their activities, and that form what Grimmer considers to be the final outcome.

The participants are shown an assortment of clothes, wigs and masks, that they are encouraged to consider in unconventional ways. Grimmer suggests that they consider how each garment might clothe the body without adherence to its usual mode of wearing. Trousers can become belts; skirts can become capes; jackets can become hats; and sleeves can become additional appendages that protrude from the body, complicating its silhouette. Participants are also encouraged to create new items of clothing by buttoning several garments together. These suggestions are evocative of the work of Japanese fashion design Rei Kawakubo, whose Wrapped collection (1983) contained ‘flaps and appendages that could be tied…in a variety of ways" so that wearers could “design clothes that have never existed”.

 Grimmer encourages participants to distort their silhouettes by knotting garments, or by cutting shapes from cardboard that could be slid inside fabric. "The further you remove [your shape] from looking like a person, the better", he tells us. The results that he hopes to encourage range from simplified shapes that smooth the body into featureless silhouettes, to complex arrangements that mask the body's true shape with additional contours.

The participants are initially conventional in their approach to the pile of garments, trying them on as they would if shopping. After a while, their confidence builds and they start to consider alternative ways to construct the relationship between the body and the garment. At Grimmer's suggestion, they start to cover their faces and their confidence grows. Like a disguise, their masks provide a hiding space, and with anonymity comes a newfound willingness to experiment. The masked participants start to take greater risks, and they dare to present their bodies in more sculptural poses.

Grimmer encourages students to work together; to bind multiple bodies into one. In doing so, he invites reference to a history of costume that transforms human bodies into other creatures by clothing them in a shared costume. I have written elsewhere about shared garments and the ways in which they force entangled wearers to move as one, single body, with shared choreography. Pantomime horses, Chinese dragons, and more recently, performance art such as Lucy Orta's Nexus Architecture (1998-2010), all require individual wearers to become part of a single ‘roving beast’ that navigates through public spaces. Individual identity is lost, and as the observer struggles to makes sense of a mass of body parts that exists beneath the clothes, the hybrid shape can only be perceived as something other-than-human.

UH artists in residence

UH Arts has an ongoing commitment to host artists in residence in the School of Creative Arts. During the 2015/16 academic year, Permindar Kaur was resident in the studios alongside Fine Art students, and the work she produced during her 6-month residency was exhibited in the Art & Design gallery throughout April.

Permindar Kaur, 2016, work-in-progress being installed as part of Interlopers, at the University of Hertfordshire Art & Design Gallery.

UH Arts took this opportunity to establish a relationship between their residency programme and researchers in the School of Creative Arts. Initially, this took the form of a blog, written by Barbara Brownie, that tracks the development of Permindar's exhibition, and reflects on the themes explored in her work. The final blog post has just been posted, and the complete list can be viewed here: https://uhartsresident.wordpress.com/blog/ The blog provided readers an opportunity to engage with Permindar's work as it developed in the studio, and prompted Permindar to consider a variety of possible responses to her planned installations.

UH Arts now intends to expand the blog, to record and reflect upon future residencies, with artists including Elizabeth Murton, Lyndall Phelps and Katy Gillam-Hull. They also hope to expand the authorship of the blog, to invite contributions from other staff across the University of Hertfordshire.

Elizabeth Murton, Neuron 2, 2014, calico, shellac ink, polycotton thread, H 28cm x W 38cm

Pat's Update on Research and Public Engagement Activities 2014-2016 and Beyond

Dr Pat Simpson, Reader in Social History of Art and SCA Research Tutor

2016-18

I am currently engaged with two research projects:

Aftermath, exhibitions and film festival at UH Gallery & St Albans Museum, 2018.

This is a collaborative project between UH Art & Design Gallery & St Albans Museum led by Matthew Shaul [UH A & D Gallery]. The project team includes Professor Owen Davies [History], Dr Sarah Lloyd [History] Annabel Lucas [UH A & D Gallery] and myself, amongst others.

The projected exhibitions and film festival will explore the aftermath of WWI through images, narratives and artefacts [some of them local], and the themes will include nostalgia for the past, visions of a new world [both positive and negative], as well as evidence that contradicts the idea propagated post-war, that WWI was the 'war to end all wars'. It is hoped that it will include photographic work by Kathe Buchler, a German photographer working both before and after WWI, who made remarkable images of recuperating soldiers as well as nostalgically idyllic landscape scenes.

My contribution to the project will involve images of Soviet health propaganda connected to the utopian ideal of creating a new world and a new type of humankind, and also images of the little known western ‘War of Intervention’ in the new Soviet state 1918-c1923.

Art and Bio-Politics: Representations of Soviet Darwinism 1917-1964.  Monograph on the Moscow Darwin Museum and its use of art in the service of bio-politics.  Currently in preparation.

2016

‘Painting as “information”?  Globalisation and Abstract Art’, in Yolanda Espina, ed.  Images of Europe. Past, Present and Future, ISSEI 2014 – Conference Proceedings, Porto: Universidade Católica Editora, 2016, pp.73-82. ISBN: 978-989-8366-82-5. eBook (PDF) available at: http://www.uceditora.ucp.pt/resources/Documentos/UCEditora/PDF%20Livros/Porto/Images%20of%20Europe.pdf

Abstract - A common belief regarding globalisation is that it is driven by ‘information’.  For Maurice Castells (1996) the primary vehicles of networked information were the internet and the media.  This paper sets out to explore whether art works, particularly paintings can be regarded as containers of information which participate in the process of globalisation.

Today, identification of what counts as a painting is sometimes problematic, nevertheless a painting still has certain basic physical and visual characteristics.  Do these characteristics constitute ‘information’ ?  I suggest that, to be able to read and understand what the characteristics might signify, we need to know about the artist and the historical context in which the work was produced. Thus, I argue that the characteristics of a painting might rather be regarded as raw ‘data’, hence the retrieval of ‘information’ depends on a process of interpretation of the data by the viewer, using verifiable data from other sources.  The extent and veracity of the retrieval and interpretation of the data will depend on the cultural/socio-political baggage that the viewer brings to the encounter with the painting, in context.

Art, particularly painting, has been used in the process of globalising cultural colonisation since at least the 1400s, and this has never been disconnected from power politics. The conclusion highlights problems with treating any visual material as ‘information’, and also the deeper problem with the concept of ‘information’, and its ambiguous relationships with constructs of truth, reality, authenticity, and with the operations of power and money.

This publication is based on an eponymous paper presented at the the International Society for the Study of European Ideas conference, Porto, Portugal, August 2014.

Forthcoming in 2016

‘Art, Biopolitics and Anglo-Soviet Cultural Exchange: The “Russian Room” at Down House 1958-1964’, in Emily Lygo, ed.  Russian Journal of Communication, special edition, 2016.  

Abstract - Charles Darwin’s home at Downe in Kent, a memorial museum now owned by English Heritage, has an interesting secret.  For a brief time between c1961 and 1964 it had a ‘Russian Room’. 

In this room were displayed commemorative paintings, monumental sculpture busts and photographic albums all sent to Britain between 1958 and 1962 by Professor Aleksandr Kots and his wife Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, the directors of the Soviet Darwin Museum in Moscow.  As will be argued, the sending of such gifts had precedents, including connections with the SCRSS, or SCR as it was named in the 1920s. 

The period in which the gifts were sent coincided with Kruschev’s ‘Thaw’, the decline of Trofim Lysenko’s power over Soviet bio-science, and the tentative resumption of Anglo-Soviet cultural and scientific relations.  This talk examines some aspects of the contextual and strategic motivations for the gifts, their display and the eventual closure of the ‘Russian Room’.

This publication is based on the paper: ‘The Russian Room at Down House Kent: Anglo Soviet Relations with the Moscow Darwin Museum in the 1950s-1960s’, delivered at the conference British-Soviet Friendship and Cultural Exchange: Promotion, Partnership and Propaganda conference, Brixton, May 2014.

‘Lysenko “Michurinism and Art 1935-1964’, in William deJong Lambert & Nikolai Krementsov, eds, Lysenkoism as a Global Phenomenon, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Abstract - This chapter offers a case study from an art historian’s perspective, of the impact of the growth and decline of Trofim Lysenko’s power between 1935 and 1964 on the displays at the Darwin Museum, a natural history museum in Moscow. The institution was unusual for the heavy commitment of its directors, Aleksandr Kots and Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, to the use of art works for illuminating past and contemporary evolutionary theory within the displays. The discussion focuses on the Museum’s strategic, discursive use of what Nikolai Krementsov has termed “Marxist Darwinst” rhetoric, in contextualising and explaining the significance of the art works, in order to defend its position and access state resources for a larger building to house the collection.

It will be seen that the Darwin Museum gradually aligned itself in the 1920s-1930s with aspects of Marxist Darwinism that became key elements of Lysenko’s “Michurinist biology”. This strategy opened up a gap between the scientific research and interests of the museum directorate, their connections with western scientists, and what was said to the museum visitors. Lysenko’s triumph in August 1948 necessitated dramatic changes to the museum display and very careful adherence to the current nuances of Lysenko’s version of “Michurinist biology”. After 1955, while Kruschev’s “Thaw” and de-Stalinisation allowed the museum tentatively to indicate visually its (enduring) adherence to genetics rather than Michurinism, this was strategically, equivocally expressed - ultimately to the museum’s disadvantage regarding the new building.

In conclusion, while the study notes that the museum clearly contributed, however unwillingly, to the entrenchment of Lysenkoism, it vividly illustrates some of the attendant dangers of transforming the complex discourses of science into simplified and demagogic “cultural resources.”  In particular, it underlines the deep problems underlying any suppression of public access to the complexity and relativism of real scientific discourse.

In the course of producing this chapter I was put in touch with Ben Lewis, a successful, award-winning, British freelance documentary film-maker who is preparing to make a drama-documentary about the Soviet ‘pseudoscientist’ Trofim D. Lysenko. I supplied him with visual data on two of Lysenko’s victims who are depicted in portraits displayed at the State Darwin Museum in Moscow, and also information on the Darwin Museum to Ben Lewis, September 2014. This contact has led to a recent invitation to collaborate with a number of eminent historians of science, notably William deJong Lambert, Nikolai  Krementsov and Kiril Rossianov, to support Lewis’ bid to the US National Endowment for the Humanities ‘Bridging Cultures’ fund, to develop the film.

2015

‘Shaw and The Russians on The Mantelpiece’, presentation to volunteers and staff, Shaw’s Corner [National Trust], Ayot St Lawrence, Herts. February 2015.

Abstract - On the mantelpiece in the dining room at Shaw’s Corner there are images of 3 Russians – Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskii, and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.  The focus of my talk is to say something about who these people were, what they did and why, perhaps, Shaw was so interested in them that he ensured that images of them were prominently embedded in the display at Shaw’s Corner when it was handed over to the National Trust.  I will look at Lenin first, move on to Dzerzhinsky, and end with Stalin [as so many people did…].

This talk related in part to my own research specialism in Soviet and Russian visual images, and also to the outstanding  work of my AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral student, Alice McEwan, on the Shaw’s Corner collection.

‘Beauty and the Beast: Imaging Human Evolution at the Moscow Darwin Museum in the 1920s’, in Fay Brauer & Serena Keshavjee, eds, Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture, Newcastle-upon-Tyne:  Cambridge Scholars’ Press, April 2015, pp.157-178.  ISBN 978-1-4438-7253-9.

Abstract - The Darwin Museum in Moscow was, from its foundation in 1907, committed to using art works to support stories of evolution.  Nationalised in 1917 as an adjunct of Moscow State University, the museum remained under the direction of its founder, Professor Aleksandr Kots, a zoologist, ornithological expert and amateur taxidermist.  He directed and supervised the creation of paintings and sculptures, principally made by Vasilii Vatagin, an artist and zoologist, to support the versions of Darwinism being projected over that period.  From the October Revolution to his death in 1964, Kots ensured that the displays at the Museum were always politically correct.

This chapter explores the potential contextual resonances of certain works by Vatagin and others in the early Revolutionary period.  The discussion starts with an examination of a pair of monumental sculptures by Vatagin entitled Age of Life (1926), depicting the variations of role, behaviour and appearance of, on the one hand Orangutans (the beast), and on the other hand, human women at different stages of their lives (beauty). The paper then goes on to consider how the modes of imaging, both in these sculptures and in other works representing human evolution in this period, connected with contemporary discourses on, and visualisations of  Darwinian evolutionary theory, both in the Soviet Union and in Western Europe.   What emerges, I argue, is a complex relationship between the images and the dialectic between contemporary Bolshevik anxieties about degeneration within the Soviet population, and utopian dreams of the Revolutionary production of a new, human biologic type.

‘Art History, Politics, Heritage’, digital poster presentation, Public Engagement with Research conference UH, June 2015. 

‘Prince Peter Kropotkin: Anarchism, Eugenics and the Utopian Ideal of Letchworth Garden City’, Utopia!  Experiments in Perfection conference, Letchworth, September 2015.

Abstract - Prince Peter Kropotkin was a major Russian pre-Revolutionary socialist, who, prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, theorised an anarchist [ie. without a centralised government and associated administrative bureaucracy] theory of a potential utopian form of social existence.  Like the English utopian socialist, William Morris (who may have drawn on Kropotkin’s work), Kropotkin’s  ideal was of a semi-agrarian idyll as set out in his book, Farms, Fields and Factories (1898), comprising both intellectual and physical labour. Kropotkin was also very interested in the new discourse area of eugenics, and prominently participated in debates during the 1912 International Congress of Eugenics in London.  This paper considers the implications of the records held at the Letchworth Garden City Archive, regarding both Kropotkins’ interest in eugenics and in the construction of utopian anarchist society through innovative social housing projects.

2014

‘Tales from the ‘Russian Room’ at Down House, Kent’: talk given to members of the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies, SCRSS headquarters, Brixton, March 2014.

Abstract - Charles Darwin’s home at Downe in Kent, a memorial museum now owned by English Heritage, has an interesting secret.  For a brief time between c1961 and 1964 it had a ‘Russian Room’.  In this room were displayed commemorative paintings, monumental sculpture busts and photographic albums all sent to Britain by Professor Aleksandr Kots and his wife Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, the directors of the Soviet Darwin Museum in Moscow.  The period coincided with Kruschev’s ‘Thaw’, the decline of Trofim Lysenko’s power over Soviet bio-science, and the tentative resumption of Anglo-Soviet cultural and scientific relations.  This talk examines some aspects of the strategic motivations for the gifts, their display and the eventual closure of the ‘Russian Room’. [This is quite an established organisation (founded 1926) which has a broad membership that includes people who are just interested in the Soviet Union, and emigrés from Russia and the Soviet bloc, as well as a few academics and teachers of Russian. 

The paper was occasioned by the fact that the Darwin Museum has first established contact with the eminent British biologist and later vociferous opponent of the Soviet ‘pseudoscientist’ Trofim Lysenko, Julian Huxley, through the SCR [Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, which was the SCRSS’s predecessor].  The research has also enabled the SCRSS to gain more insight into Society’s activities in the 1920s.]

‘Art or Illustration?  The Status of Painting and Sculpture in the Soviet Natural History Museum’, Association of Art Historians Conference, London, April 2014.

Abstract - It might be said that a painting is a painting and a sculpture is a sculpture, and as such they putatively belong to the realm of ‘fine art’.  Such objects, particularly when offering recognisable figurative representations and created out of traditional materials, seem clearly to declare their status and/or definition.  But, what if the painting or sculpture has a useful function within a natural history museum in illuminating or illustrating the history of evolutionary theory, or, through portraiture, represents a hagiography of evolutionary theorists?  Is it, therefore, a piece of decorative art because of its illustrative connotations?  This is the big overarching question I opened out to the panel and audience, because I did not, then, have any clear answers.

This paper focused on the Moscow Darwin Museum. This natural history museum was founded in 1907 at the Higher Women’s Courses institute attached to Moscow University. Nationalised in 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution, it still exists.  The initial directors, Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots and Professor Aleksandr Kots were thoroughly committed to using art [paintings, drawings and sculpture, including taxidermy] as means to enliven the delivery of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The paper scrutinised the use of Soviet institutional acceptance of the difference between ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ arts [illustration] by the museum directorate as a means of defence against possible criticism of the works shown at the museum.

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