Personal Blogs

West (2018)[1] writes:

As a learner, I find that unhelpful. The point seems to be that I am warned from assessing ‘the success or failure of a work’. It is hard to see that anyone approaching even the bare title of TMA03 would make this error. To remind ourselves the title, without the long tail of its ‘guidance’ and ambiguous references to Susie West’s thoughts in section 4, of which the above is an example, is:

Where therein is an invitation to ‘assess the success or failure of a work’.

And then there is the ‘connected trio’. The warning not to combine these seems also quite leading, as being more than advisory: perhaps threatening failure in the task. What trait, that West imagines to characterise postgraduate learners? I imagine it can only be that such learners might so far outreach themselves as to think that they can aspire to challenge the categorical assumptions she makes about history, theory and criticism. We are to believe, for instance, that distinguishing history from theory is totally possible: that history could be (and should be if that learner know what’s good for him/her) conceptualised a-theoretically. West elides the obvious problems here by choosing to warn us off ‘criticism’ rather than theory, else she would have had to have written:

This would be self-evidently nonsense, since a literature review and exploration of themes at Master's level would clearly be enhanced by some sense of the theoretical approach to history the work will take.

My problem is that, as one of the learners receiving such instruction, it feels appropriate to me to approach the notion of an ‘interior’ precisely through both history the act of capture of the phenomenon in consciousness. We start with the senses, of course, but all the senses in concert and in the light of the body’s sense of space (proprioception). In turn those interact with the cognitive-affective perceptual systems that combine with senses in perception moving both bottom-up and top-down.

And this can be historically validated. Consider a ‘room’ or other space in Woolf’s fiction for instance. Mrs Ramsay apprehends those spaces as knowable only in relation to consciousness. Mrs Ramsey in To The Lighthouse apprehends a room only in terms of the intentional force of her consciousness in shaping it. As the dining-room door is held open for her:

An interior space here is in fact a ‘time-space’ known only in relation to the body that moves through it and is agentive in its shaping in doing so. This could be claimed to be ‘theory’ but it is also ‘history’ since it involves direct apprehension of the passage of time. For me this can, and would, shape one’s response to interiors as designed and shaped, and continually re-configured by the act of living bodies moving through them and moving ‘things’ within them, like doors, tables, fire-screens, room-screens, furniture, ornaments, paper or paint coverings ……

Hence my interest in phenomenology. But while my interest rises, Susie West haunts me with her strictures of over-reaching, of thinking too much for myself, of departing from a template. But taking even a basic definition of phenomenology, its use is apparent:

To study these things is NOT, as West suggests, to seek to know Duncan Grant’s, or Vanessa Bell’s, intention in creating the interiors they did – in shaping space, light, lines and pattern etc. It is to research how meanings in the cognitive-affective realm, overdetermined almost certainly by the socio-cultural semiological-domain, shape and reshape sense perception and Husserlian ‘intentionality’ of that we call, once apprehended, an ‘interior’. That is to say that the placing and decoration of a mantelpiece is not immune from the meanings associated with the ‘fireplace’ or ‘hearth’ it surmounts. It is even less immune from meanings of hearth that helped co-shape notions of family, subjectivity and collectivism that are part and parcel of the things assembled to make up interiors.

 This is a personal argument but it feels urgent. To learn is to adventure but it ought not to be to accept over-prescription. Educators can lead but they can’t determine – that is a much more complex cooperative endeavour between persons, and including autonomous learners, objects and their intersecting agencies. I feel as if I becoming drawn into Bruno Latour here – but let’s leave it there. Course leaders in the history of art have to empathise with learner aspiration, in as far as this is confined to learning and not ‘grades’, and not put up barriers, whose sole purpose is to lower expectations of not only learners but learning as the intentionality behind the existence of institutions like the Open University.

Using our home to discuss the 5 qualities of architecture A844 Ex 4.2.2

Image 1 here. All images on (restricted access) https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/studio/slotedit.php?id=1312146&sid=0&type=110&ssid=608643

Image 2 here

Image 3 here

Basic exterior description

·        Form: symmetric from front elevation and based on rectangular forms under a pitched and tiled roof. Standing off the road up a short drive. Built in the 1930s of red-brick and ash-mortar (usual in homes of this era in mining country). Asymmetrically developed to back with extension (1960s?) (seen looking from the non-extended end to include scullery, downstairs toilet and over it, extending to original wall a bathroom on the first floor. A symmetrical flat-roof

·        Space: the exterior expresses the organisation of interior spaces through basic symmetry of equal-size (roughly) rooms to either side of a passage and staircase. The dominance of the passage is now concealed by conservatory across the front of the house, which is flat-roofed but has been adapted following rain entry. Space is organised as small, discrete units, with no or limited visual interconnections; no significant variation in spatial experience beyond the functional.

·        Design: theory of design ultimately derived from the modern movement’s priority of function (long, multipurpose living room). The house built on elevated ground above ground but surrounded by mature trees. All windows have been replaced by wood-effect PVC French windows and door with brass door furniture. There is a simple stained glass design in top windows of French panels. Utilitarian design veneered by effects aiming unsuccessfully at aged appearance.

·        Order: modular, in the sense that the ground plan is generated by three rectangles (living room, kitchen, dining room), which probably dictate the form.

·        Structure: load-bearing walls, red-brick with ash mortar construction.

 NOW to INTERIORS.

Start with the fact that the boundary between exterior and interior is constantly compromised. There is immediate visual access to conservatory, serving as a rather cluttered art-library. From outside we see bookcases and free-standing book-piles with busts to the front (Dickens Centenary Bust and a garden ‘classical’ but of once Roman style in alabaster but strongly weathered and lichened. This stands on a ‘garden-centre’ mock classical plinth. The intention is clearly to disturn signs of exterior/interior placement in fitting with flagged flooring. Reproduction picture are there and about – an anoymous collage, reproduction Picasso & Degas.

This theme is there in visual access to back porch containing large AlastaIR Gray designed poster for his own version of Lanark as a play in the 1970s.

See conservatory from within

Image 4 here

Here ‘statuary maintain outward gaze, The conservatory has been divided at front main door by free-standing bookcases (reproduction, antiquarian and IKEA mix) and are cluttered, although the mix of outdoor / indoor continues with plant arrangement around it. Dickens squats on a plinth made to look like a pile of books. Clutter is totally embraced here, even in disposition of smaller busts of writers, artist and musicians (as well a Cretan Runner head (tourist-Crete). The dog is an essential interior feature and part of the clutter of living. Movable steps show that library is functional.

To the Passage

Image 5 here

The passage from the top of the staircase from where you get the view of the bathroom by turnind to your left (on the way down). The passage has a dog-bed near the radiator, a dog, and busts (a phrenology head) and lithographs (these are by miners who were and are also painters. You can see ‘The Nature Walk’ (of Murton Village in the East Coast of Durham) but not ‘The Pantry’ (a picture of a storage shed nearly Gothic in its conception. The section of the living roo has faux pottery, more art books and a reproduction bust of Dante wearing a rainbow gay-liberation bow-tie.

TURNING ROUND IN THE LIVING-ROOM

Image 6 here

Image 7 here

From Dante looking to the opposite corner note TV controls a large pouffe and a reproduction fireplace surrounded by busts of a mummy (Museum copy) and  a classical bust. The fire is pretend-natural fuelled by gas. Further busts to table with books which are being used cluttered on the table (and unseen in the pouffe). Tennyson is there but busts are otherwise classical. The other side of the sofa is bookcase with a collection of Carroll (my husband) and Hugh MacDiarmid (me) next to a reproduction Titian and topped with classical copies – including a plaster ‘satyr’ head the seller of which claimed to be one of the BM’s old reproductions. You can’t see Milton but he’s there too. The paintings are an Ashley Jackson print (from the town where I was born of Holme Moss) and an original North-East  painter’s sea painting of the North Easst coast. Little statuettes around are, of course Discobulus, Hygeia (from Athens museum) and the Boy removing a thorn.

My husband didn’t let me show the dining-room.

QUEER INTERIORS

This is a duel idea in the literature. Queer was reclaimed by the male gay movement as a word once used negatively against ‘homosexuals’ and in this usage is positive – it blazens a desire not to be thought to be the ‘norm’. But it is also a marker of any transgression of the normation whether that be heteronormative or homonormative. In the literature, even when both senses are simultaneously used it can be important to distinguish the usesa to look at nuanced meanings. This is particularly the arena of the USA art-historian, John Potvin. I’ll use Potvin (2014). [1]

Applying this theory to the case above is a work in progress and for another time. Potvin’s (2014:23) analysis quotes a Law Society memorandum in the 1950s stated, ‘male persons living together do not constitute domestic life’. This is one context of alienation of gay men from the notion of the domestic. The second is binary gender categories which identify the feminine as if it represent a real unseen essence (identifiable in the end as the presence or absence of ‘balls’ – a less material issue that people think) that could inhabit persons of either gender. The enemy of such views are ones that see masculinity and femininity playing off against and within each other and terribly named for things so playfully interchangeable, liminal and non-essential. The third is the sexualisation of the ‘homosexual’ such that it is the primary marker of the ‘category’. Potvin’s queer interiors stress the way domesticity is marginalised in accounts of the queer, sometimes militantly since it smells of stereotyping. Potvin using literary and evidence from art carves a space for a ‘queer interior’ that situates the domestic in difference. To do this Potvin (2014:12) uses Charles Rice’s view that ‘the interior emerged in a domestic sense as a new topos of subjective interiority and … practices of self-representation in domestic life’. I hope he goes further though than ‘self-fashioning’ into redefinitions of even more sacred concepts than interiors – hearths, homes, families and communal support. Obviously this might be more hard-nosed than Kate Millett’s versions for which she paid a high price for just a bit of naivety. Its politics are radical and pedagogical. As he says (p. 29) this may surprise precisely because, ‘it is within spaces of the modern interior, rather than the alienating public sphere, that culture of this nature could actually take place’.

 Styles (2006) on lodging-houses, the homes of the poor and evidence for them Exercise 3.5.3

I want to use this exercise to reflect again on different kinds of evidence in architectural history. Linked to this is the ever-present concentration on ‘thing theory’ and materiality in the literature. This is something we need to come to terms with, since the issue about the definition of things, objects and commodification and mass-production are all interlinked but I still really only have the pointers from the course on this and may need more reading.

In its portrayal of work on interiors this section has concentrated on ‘probate inventories’ as evidence of the materials in which we see, often though in list-form rather than ordered as an appearance, which they also were, the home-interiors of the rich and ‘middling’ (that horrible vague word. There is important evidence taken on the importance of a population of single women on p. 11 (original 70).

The persons dealt with by styles own nothing, rent (by choice it is somewhere naively said). The whole issue seems to be that the role of CHOICE and agency raised by probate inventories in the life of the rich can’t be applicable to this class in which choice of accommodation was limited by income and unmet needs raised by a way of living they would not have chosen anyway. Now too things can’t be presumed to be owned by these persons. We move from probate inventories to police inventories related to theft. Here an issue rises between the ownership of things between tenant lodger and landlord.

Very interesting data is raised in comparing these inventories in changes of the relative importance to owners, tenants and criminals of item types – linen staying stable in importance (with good critical-caveats) but the importance of metalwork things, often utilitarian rising). The reflection on this evidence comes on p. 10 (original 69).

 Alternative models of the period room A844 Geffrye Museum Blog 3.3.2 Exercise

 The rooms are presented to be viewed via an absent fourth wall and any sense of the tactility of our experience of interiors is studiously removed. The objects look as if they have never been moved and never will be. One does not even have a sense of their maintenance by cleaning and so on. This robs the experience of any sense of the individual psychology of interior-making and ongoing evaluation or of shared social factors – family and the role, if any of servants. This is disguised too by an irritating focus on the ‘middling’ nature of social class presented across the rooms. We aren’t aware or made so by the curator that to be ‘middling’ probably meant very different things at each date (1630 – 1910) and that the scale on which the ‘middling classes’ appeared on was continually changing.

 The decision to organise rooms by date rather than ‘period’ at least admits to a kind of variability. I rather like Marjorie Quennell’s idea of peopling rooms with cut-outs. This created probably the necessary artificiality and theatricality and stopped anyone believing this was about what life felt like across a range of senses – a bit like a Brechtian alienation effect.

 The role of evidence in the recreation of rooms – largely written or published evidence & social records – probate inventories in the 18^th C, later sales catalogues or retailer or manufacturers records of sale. The judicious use of recreating more ephemeral items like the 1910 lampshade is interesting.

 The 1910 room would make interesting comparison to Omega style in Bloomsbury but the latter comes from records covering feelings about interiors, including diaries, photographs, paintings (often of people in rooms where the room is incidental). The issue about being a contrast to shows ‘leaders of elite taste’ raised in the Discussion below, will have to be considered when looking at Omega, but it is more complex than a straight comparison. My interest is raised in ‘mantelpieces’ and the display of objects thereon – very important in cluttered Charleston.

Course Discussion

Like the V&A, the Geffrye now has a chronological span of rooms; however, these do not end in 1900 but go well into the twentieth century. Although the Geffrye’s rooms were always also intended to be educational, their focus was on objects associated with everyday life, rather than on design reform as at the V&A. This reflected Marjorie Quennell’s pioneering work on the education of young people and her emphasis on social rather than political history. It was she who arranged the collections in a sequence of period rooms and ‘peopled’ the spaces with painted boards of life-size figures. Nevertheless, it was tropes such as elite tradesmen including Chippendale and Thomas Sheraton that were used to distinguish the eighteenth-century rooms in the museum’s handbooks.

Although it retains the doll’s house model of viewing without a fourth wall, like the V&A the Geffrye now pays close attention to appropriate details and some rooms are based on surveys of actual sites. One key difference is that the Geffrye recreates room types of a particular date representing London’s middling sort rather than those of leaders of elite taste across Britain at the V&A, although at the V&A the Henrietta Street room represents a ‘polite’ drawing room rather than an aristocratic one.

For the furnishing of the early rooms the Geffrye makes particular use of probate inventories, whose reach, however, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was still limited to the wealthier half of the population and focused on moveable goods rather than fixtures such as wall coverings and chimneypieces.

Interior installation and Queer Interiors: Exercise 3.2 A844: Elmgreen & Dragset 

The text of the interview with Elmgreen and Dragset is below (downloadable from V&A link). I can’t say how happy this way of opening this Section of the Course made me. But this was so because I ignored the instruction to listen to only 2-3 minutes of the 10 minute interview. So first my caveat on the pedagogy here:

There is a notion of academic focus that means a principle of relevance is applied to search for research data and sources, that occurs too in the selection and editing of our reading but I think it often comes too soon to encourage lateral and creative thought. This is probably totally necessary but it means that principles of economy often interfere with the interpretation of these data in what I see as damaging ways. Below you see that very valuable reflections are seen, in a preliminary search to be cut out of our understanding of the work of these artists. I’ve made sections in red. This includes:

But delighted I was. Here is a summary why: The first target of art-history courses these days is a caveat against crude biographical approaches. Although probably worth addressing, this is often taken as a means of seeing a null relationship between extended concepts of life (absorbed often into ‘social history, or, if you’re lucky, psychosocial history) and art. Like the Vorticists, I think this must be restored.

 This can mean being afraid to address issues of sexual orientation which Elmgreen and Dragset address directly, whether in a Holocaust Memorial, a poolside scenario or a the narrative of a man’s growth from boy to ‘failed’ man (as in Tomorrow 2013). The latter is telling. We know this is art ‘about’ sexual ‘orientation/development’, not because it is explicitly about a gay male (it may or may not be) but because it is the representation of a concept – that of the ‘interior’ that is ‘queered’: it cannot be easily legible from frameworks of understanding that are normative. Hence it disrupts expectations at nearly all points, even when it represents the norms of ‘home’, retrospective memory, the comfort of home, the role of work (especially work focused on designing other people’s interiors) and ‘family’ (whatever we take that to mean- biological families or ‘families-by-choice’, which the radical gay movement once lauded). We see a lonely boy in a fireplace dominated by sentimental self-representation that denies his development or squashes it with phallic imagery in lieu of life like a cigar (even though, ‘a cigar is sometimes just a cigar’ it means something in terms of group-gendering identity and fixing it in too solid a representation).

This choice of section-opening I love because it in part raises how I might approach interiors in the thought, art and life of Duncan Grant. I might concentrate on Charleston but interiors can never focus on one artist – they are always about collective lives, work and representations. This doesn’t just mean we ’include’ Vanessa Bell too in a naively inclusive paradigm but look at the meanings sustained by a home wherein inputs were trans-historical and trans-personal, and, of course, transsexual and ranged between objects and decoration of uncertain boundaries). Charleston is a queer home I would hypothesise in many ways – less obvious and conscious than those in Elmgreen & Dragset but no less integral to the way we conceptualise an ‘interior’, starting with its definition (no mean starting task).#

 So here goes!

Steve

 V&A Transcript

 Damien Whitmore: Elmgreen and Dragset are the rising stars of the contemporary art world and in October this year they will be presenting a major exhibition at the V&A and it promises to be absolutely extraordinary. I’ve come to their studio in Berlin to find out more about their ideas, their creative process and what motivates them.

This is a former water pumping station and I wonder if that’s a kind of metaphor for how you work together - in terms of the free-flow of ideas and the constant pumping out of work.

Michael Elmgreen: Yes, filtering a bit of the dirty water and turning it into drinkable water, ha ha. There are not many industrial buildings from that period (1924) left in Berlin. It was fantastic to find this building and then be able to shape it and transform it after our own needs. Our idea with making a studio this way was to mix private lives with the more work-based activities, where the transitions between your private personal life and your public image become kind of blurred.

Damien Whitmore: You are very well known in the contemporary art world, obviously, but for V&A visitors you may be less well known. So could you perhaps say a bit about what kind of artists you are, how do you describe yourselves?

Ingar Dragset: We get our ideas from daily life - anything can inspire us. You know, it can be a newspaper article, it can be a book we have read, it can be a political situation, changes in society.

Michael Elmgreen: The kind of art we do has several formats, our works have different aesthetics. We are not really bound to certain materials or certain formal languages.

The Trafalgar Square piece ‘Powerless Structure Figure 101’ depicts a young boy on a rocking horse. He is situated on the Fourth Plinth were you have had different art projects commissioned for the past ten years. We got commissioned to make something for 2012 - 2013 and decided to show a bronze sculpture in the size of the other sculptures already existing in the Square, working with the issue of a Christian sculpture. Well, next to it is King George [statue] who looks a little bit darker and more dull and serious and we sort of coming up with a sculpture that would cheer up the old chap a bit.

Ingar Dragset: The memorial in Berlin is the official German memorial to the homosexual victims of the Nazi era. We were in a way appropriating the visual language of Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial on the other side of the street. We also made a concrete slab, but in our concrete slab you can look through a window and you see a film of two men engaging in an eternal kiss. We selected the kiss because we wanted to show something that everyone can relate to - something emotional - something you can relate to whether you’re straight or gay, no matter sexual orientation.

Damien Whitmore: You work in contemporary art museums, you work in shop windows, you work on the street as artists and curators and you now work in museums. They’re very, very different and we actually gave you a disused Victorian textiles gallery, how was that?

_________________ Selection starts here

Ingar Dragset: The V&A very kindly let us walk through the museum and come back to the director and tell what kind of spaces we were fascinated by and where we would like to work. So when we found the Textile Galleries we thought these were absolutely brilliant because they were not yet renovated. They hadn’t got refurbished with modern climatization [controlled air conditioning] and all the equipment you need now for a contemporary exhibition space.

Michael Elmgreen: ‘Tomorrow’ is almost like a film set for a not yet realised movie. It could be a Visconti or a Bergman movie. A domestic setting inhabited by a fictional character, about whom we have made a whole script . Our starting point was creating his home with all the objects and artefacts and artworks, furniture included and then from that we developed the script. Later on in the process we elaborated on the setting inspired by the script. It was a rather dynamic process.

Damien Whitmore: Could you tell us a bit more about the central character who plays this role in ‘Tomorrow’?

Ingar Dragset: The central character in the exhibition is an elderly architect, 75 years old, a failed architect. He had a lot of great ideas, he was quite visionary but he never got to realise any of his projects. He was a part-time teacher, probably at Cambridge. Visitors can see a lot of his models in the study that we install as part of his home. You do get a sense that this is a grand South Kensington apartment, all these things have trickled down through generations and now maybe the old architect living there might be the last person to sit on this from the family empire.

End of selection ______________________

Michael Elmgreen: If you respect your audience you have to consider them as complex as yourself. They are diverse, they come from many different backgrounds, so I don’t think we have such as an ideal spectator in mind when we create our works. We try to make visual statements, that are open, and that you can interpret in various ways and get something out of them. Often your audience will create and elaborate on the artworks in a much more interesting way than you ever could do yourself - they make it wilder, more romantic, sentimental or perverse than your intentions were to start with.

Ex 2.2 A844 Block3 Gender & space: Elizabeth Wilson Into the Labyrinth

Once you have finished the extract go back and make a list in the box below of as many of the paired characteristics or contrasting terms as you can which Wilson discusses as framing our understanding of the urban. What do you think the impact is of this way of defining the city?

The ’list’ given by Wilson is on p. 152;

Of course the last one is the culmination of the essay.

One impact is to set up a preferred and not preferred option, but it isn’t always clear on which side this falls. We could say that these binaries express socio-cultural determined preferences and what becomes subordinated to these.  These issues are obviously to the fore in doppleganger myhs such as Jekyll and Hyde, or Dorian Gray.

For Wilson the issue is to explain how left radicalism often damns the city because of its alliances in this binary. However she then insists that this is at a contrary to the experience of her life as a woman – that women and the city have a hidden connection other than at the level of male otherness or repository for his unacknowledged desires – the prostitute stereotype.

She sees that ‘making strange’ as a function of cities has a role in freeing women from patriarchal norms that may be akin to the experience of her own longing and desire despite men not because of them (149f.)

Steve

1.5.1 Landscape Character A844

Read the description of rolling estate farmlands given on Suffolk Landscapes, and view the inset graphic for the ‘Composite of Characteristic Features’ which shows the key features. ‘Estate’ is not defined here, but you should take it to be a unit of land ownership (usually centred on a core of house, gardens and parkland) which sits above individual tenant farms and has a diverse range of habitats relating to the production of timber, game birds or fishing.

·        What are the designed aspects identified within this landscape type?

It depends how ‘design’ is characterised but ‘human design’ enters with use of the land for human purposes (‘Landholding and Enclosure pattern’). Not everyone will equate these patterns as design. They are patterns built out of numerous variant contributions over space and time. In so far as there are patterns, they are likely to reflect usage and agreed or informal constraints on usage, but they will often reshape geology and the appearance of landscape to the eye. The issue of estate development is important because of the shift from more communal forms to those based on aggregated land ownership, exploitation or public and private objectives.  Issues of settlement and urban growth only involve design in a very complex way too. The way the piece uses ‘ancient’ in scare quotes is interesting since looking ‘ancient’ can be a matter of design rather than just tolerance or negligence of aspects of landscape with no known current human interests implied.

·        How far is this an interpretive statement?

What is ‘designed’ is always interpretive. The term was used as evidence for God’s hand in creation. Design that leads to ‘patterns’ need not be the product of a unified or even pre-meditated plan, although elements of planning may come together and some will have accidental similarities – just as ‘enclosure’ ridded us of common lands and the concept of commonwealth. When Suffolk County Council say that the whole has a ‘tidy estate countryside feel’, a very complex ideological judgement is made that has a lot to do with concepts of imposed human order (the ‘tidy’) rather than beauty or other aesthetic category. There remains a sense of ‘God’s in his Heaven/All’s right with the world’ (Browning’s Pippa Passes).

When an evaluative word like ‘good’ is used, we wonder how the values underlying it are formed – particularly in relation to the phrase, ‘good despite the post war modification of the field patterns’.

Lillie Catalogue: The essays on Architecture in Renaissance Painting: Based A844 Ex. 4.4.5-6

 1.     ‘Entering the picture’ elaborates on how the viewer might enter in the picture through the architectural devices employed by painters of the Renaissance.

In reading this part of the catalogue, consider how Lillie is answering the question: ‘to what extent [were] late medieval and Renaissance artists engaged in creating pictures that could be visually inhabited?’ (Lillie, 2014).

2.     ‘Place making’ outlines the ways in which architecture could construct a sense of ‘place’. The introductory section analyses how Veneziano’s Virgin and Child was incorporated into the street, which should allow you to link this with the discussion in Section 1 of this block about miraculous images in public space.

In the exhibition space, the painting was placed high above the entrance to the gallery, along with the contemporary etching and map showing its placement and the ceremonial route (Figures 3 and 4 in the online exhibition catalogue). This points to the ways that display is also crucial for exhibitions and can help elucidate some of the important points the exhibition raises.

3.     ‘Architectural time’, the final essay, examines the ways that artists attempted to portray time through architecture. In particular, it looks at the issue of time in relation to the Nativity, and seeks to answer the following question: ‘What roles does architecture play in creating, structuring, or confusing time in these pictures?’ (Lillie, 2014).

You might want to think about why the author has chosen the Nativity as a particular subject to explore this theme

Ex. 4.5.6

For catalogue entries remember to include:

·       an in-depth visual and textual analysis (including provenance and material condition)

·       references to other relevant images and collections

·       an individual bibliography.

Before reading the exhibition catalogue’s conclusion, consider what you have learned from the exhibition.

·       Was it successful in conveying the role that architecture has to play in Renaissance paintings?

• • Yes. It made available new ways of talking about the relationship of content, form & context, whilst engaging in close readings of the pictures themselves in terms of different layers of meaning and relevance to viewers contemporary to the paintings and after.

·       Do the works of art chosen support the arguments made in the catalogue essays? Do they answer the questions posed?

• • Yes. But that is barely surprising, given the resources of the National Gallery. What would surprise would be choosing paintings that might be more resistant to those readings but in which they still have relevance. Much nearer to a way of working that questions its own historical assumptions. A less historicist take (or its potential, would be also be interesting to have such as in Rubin’s work.

Now read H. Brandhorst, ‘Aby Warburg’s wildest dreams come true?’ (2013) and consider the pros and cons of digital databases, particularly for your own research.

This wasn’t for me a useful read because if anything it reinforced a strong message in this section of the course that image research is ultimately a means of modernising Panofsky’s iconographical project. It may be that the course is actually saying that. There appear throughout it hints of the best option for a safe way forward, particularly ones which make you think you are dealing with theory whilst actually reproducing the hoariest of approaches to imagery and the image.

Reading Brandhorst feels like reading Frances Yates except for the sense you need to devote your life to projects in Yates is missing in Brandhorst, who is described as an ‘independent researcher’. In a sense this essay is really just a version of debates about metadata in digital technological circles – the words, phrases and other signs used to store, categorise and connect data in a knowledge web. Inevitably, even for images, these have to be words and subject to linguistic disciplines of a kind. Hence the act of storing is always already an act of interpretation, as it was for Warburg and Panofsky if in different ways, since the former embraced, even if sometimes reluctantly, the subjectivity and potential to mania involved in the project.

There is a sense in which all research is like that from George Eliot’s Casaubon onwards – from pigeonholes to connectionist webs. Like them connections can often depend entirely on how you write the categories used for storage. Like Dorothea most of us, really, can’t wait for the Casaubon in us to kick the bucket in order to make our connectionism more visceral and organic.

For me, looking for the category of ‘nude male groups’ (nude AND male AND groups in Boolean terms) is anyway a way of connecting Bruno Latour’s views of the relationship between assemblies and representation to concerns with bodies arranged in and as part of the total space that makes up an artistic composition. But once you create such a category you are dependent on others having done so too if your search is to have many hits.

However. I’m left here I a kind of quandary. What does the discussion say?

Discussion

Brandhorst’s article reveals the ways in which a fairly simple image – a man carrying another – can actually be linked to a variety of themes (moral and religious) and iconographic meanings. His article reveals a very crucial part of art historical investigation, ‘the associative links that connect visual and textual images, motifs, and themes’ (Brandhorst, 2013, p. 73).

Even if you don’t subscribe to the iconographical approach as articulated by Panofsky, the ability to interpret images and understand their meaning is a crucial part of art history. The ways a motif might be copied, and how its meaning changes in that process, is again something art historians are particularly attentive to. You will recall from A843, Block 3, that the practice of iconography emerged from a text-based approach to images; however, there is also a fundamental visual element to the way meaning is made through mapping images and bringing together different types of image.

Most importantly, Brandhorst articulates the difficulty in using language for images, particularly in terms of categorising them in databases or collections. Gathering information about images, and, in particular, historical images or ones that are removed from our own cultural and social understanding, involves a complex process. That is, we can’t expect digital databases or photographic collections to necessarily give us answers; they are tools by which we build up knowledge to eventually make connections that can construct an understanding. The digitisation of images is thus not only about making more images available, but needs to be thought of in terms of how we do art history, and how we approach images and texts and the relationship between the two.

Back to me

Well! I was convinced before that the project ‘involves a complex process’. In the end research involves a dialectic where struggle with the materials is still the main point. That is what I gained at the end – as well as an irritation with the digressive return to iconography which certainly doesn’t help me, given the latter's focus not only text and image but on image as one element of a whole composition we recognise s a picture. My interest isn't in one configuration of the 'figures' available to painting from the visual world – whether ‘man carrying another’ or ‘woman as gift-bearer’.

Theory of the Image A844 Exs. 3.4.1

Read the given extracts from:

W .J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology  (1986)

W .J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994)

Hans Belting, ‘Image, medium, body: a new approach to iconology’ (2005)

Bruno Latour, ‘What is iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars?’ (2002)

October group, ‘Roundtable: the predicament of contemporary art' (Foster et al., 2004).

What sense have you gained of the changing terms of an understanding of the relation of word and image?

These essays don’t really provide anything like a linear development of theory and lots of issues seem to be contingent on the kind of works that are being discussed. I can’t, for instance, see Belting’s contributions as easily divorced from debates about the image related to the transition from image as real presence to construct and hence the rooting of the debate in systems of belief.

There is always a concern expressed at the inability of a single academic discipline to address the debate and the critique of attempts by art-history to do so start with addressing the inadequacy of iconographic approaches. In Mitchell (1986), the debate centres on how ‘image’ is used in discourses, revealing its dependence, in iconography for instance, on the written word, or, at least a ‘dialect of word and image’ (43). His view is that this dialectic is not essential quality of the ‘image’ but a historical variable wherein the specific configurations of word – image relationships serve political interests. Hence the need to distinguish in the debate relationships between image, text and ideology (the latter being the role of the relationship in contemporary social power relationships (I think). One version of this he explores in Mitchell (1994) named as ‘the pictorial turn’ within postmodernism (15). For him it equates (16, p. 3) spectatorship with reading as a process of decoding the presented stimulus.

His answer is not to deconstruct iconology but o reconstruct it in terms of the self-awareness of the image of itself as an image and the debates it feels thence a need to enter – like the paragone themes of Renaissance culture.

Belting’s (2005) insistence on new critical vocabulary -  image, medium, body – is not a mere addition to text and ideology but a further deepening of the self-consciousness of imagery about itself that is not, as Panofsky is, confined to discourses about art (303) The aim is to ally with ‘neurobiology’ – to find all images a compromise between origination as endogene and exogene (304). In all he tries to deepen ‘ideology’ so that it touches more closely the stuff of images – media used to represent and body in action.

The body, as owner and addressee of images, administered media as extensions of its own visual capacities. Bodies receive images by perceiving them, while media transmit them to bodies.  (315)

The body as ‘archetype of all visual media’ (316) is almost he ‘primitive’ of the image.

On ‘anachronism’ (to develop later) - & Didi-Huberman

 pp. 316f. & on digital image (317)

Latour’s (2002) notion of iconoclash. This looks at the fate of modernist iconoclasm (equated with Greenberg’s attempt to purify painting to a flat surface) under conditions where non-art icons of the West are being destroyed to the discomfort of even modernists (911).

The Roundtable discussions focus on the disappearance of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ BB 679. What it leaves us with is a yet undeveloped terminology for the diffusion of images across different kinds of space, including cyber-space.

Discussion from Course

The relationship of visual images to verbal language and literary narrative has been long and fraught. Both W. J. T. Mitchell and Bruno Latour discuss the Second Commandment where, it goes almost without saying, the prohibition on images is delivered in words. In the more recent post-Renaissance Western tradition, pictures and words were powerfully imbricated in doctrines such as ut pictura poesis and the Sister Arts. Visual art functioned as a supplement to literary narrative, for the most part biblical or classical. By contrast, modernism’s assertion of the autonomy of art can be understood as a defence of the independence of visual art from literary narrative.

However, the mid-twentieth-century reaction against modernism involved a pronounced ‘linguistic turn’: not merely restoring the traditional relationship of visual and verbal, but regarding the visual as a kind of language. A wide range of social activities, ranging from popular culture to ‘high’ art, were opened to a mode of analysis that was essentially rooted in linguistics. The positive effect of this was enormous. The language of semiotics flared through art, art history and cultural studies like a bush fire, vaporising pieties about art and the spirit like so many old rags. Not only were the connoisseurish archaisms of art appreciation swept away by the ‘new academy’, but the modernist attempt to theorise art as exclusively of that new understanding of images was ‘that they must be understood as a kind of language’ (Mitchell, 1986, p. 8).

In the face of this, Mitchell’s innovation, a ‘pictorial turn’ which ushered in contemporary image-theory, was to assert, quite unequivocally, that ‘Images are not just a particular kind of sign’ (Mitchell, 1986, p. 9). Mitchell saw images as crucially distinct from the realm of language. But at the same time, this was not a return to earlier ideas of words or pictures transparently representing reality, nor to the modernist myth of the complete separation of the visual from the verbal.

What factors stimulated this change of perspective?

As a (informed I hope) guess before discussion:

1.     Globalization of world economies & digital space as a replacement for transcendence.

2.     Associated growth and distribution of images and markets for commodified versions of the image in trade, commerce, politics and ‘leisure’.

3.     Distrust of transcendence but fear of its absence. At heart that may be about fear of the loss of power of the ‘hand-made’, the product of art & craft as activities rather than objects.

Discussion from Course

Two factors seem to have come together to stimulate a renewed acknowledgement of the power and specificity of the image, and a corresponding desire to move beyond the bounds of art history as such. These were, on the one hand, a growing apprehension about the increasing ‘academicisation’, in a negative sense, of the ‘new academy’ itself; and on the other an inescapable awareness of the growing power of an image-world beyond the scope of academic art history as institutionally constituted, in the badlands of the mass media and the internet.

Mitchell began to regard images as having a kind of agency, and to sketch an account of imagery which grounded their power ‘in social and cultural practices’ (Mitchell, 1986, p. 9). For this task, ‘the parochialism of art history’( Mitchell, 1986, p. 12) as conventionally understood, even in its sophisticated new incarnation, rendered it inadequate. The stakes were higher. Pictures and words, though marked by ‘some difference that is fundamental’ (Mitchell, 1986, p. 44) were nonetheless compacted together, and not to be parcelled out into the fiefdoms of separate academic disciplines. It was, precisely, the relationship of the two that was important. ‘The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves about itself’ (Mitchell, 1986, p. 43).

In subsequent works, Mitchell spoke of a ‘sense that changing modes of representation and communication are altering the very structure of human experience’ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 3). In this perspective, a newly critical iconology would aim to investigate ‘the basic construction of the human subject as a being constituted by both language and imagery’ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 24). To this end, ‘tending to the masterpieces of Western painting will clearly not be enough’ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 15).

So what did ‘Raphael like about David’s backside’? (p. 150). Reviewing, from the bottom-up: Rubin, P.L. (2018) Seen From Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art New Haven & London, Yale University Press.

Rubin’s book isn’t a lot of things: it isn’t a development of queer theory although it references that theory well in Chapter 2 (on the ‘queer [teapot] pose in Eakins and his artistic forebears [50]) and Chapter 6, in particular, and in a more nuanced way. It also isn’t in any way an attempt to present a consistent thesis, other than insisting in the instances represented by 6 very different chapters the fact that there are competing visual-rhetorical modes, and sometimes literary analogues of these (I kept thinking of Chaucer who isn’t mentioned though Dante, of course, is), of the male posterior. Sometimes this involves female ones too, although Lucian makes it clear for one Athenian, at least, this is because her backside reminds him of Ganymede (44).

In the first chapter it is clear that at least three emotional domains in particular cover the posterior and these variously recur: disgust, humour and desire. Of course these interact sometimes but mostly we stay in many chapters with the latter, ‘the spectre of the ideal male nude’ in Chapter 6 being the best. Herein lies a source of thinking about how desire of the male for the male tied itself in with both historical ideologies of the masculine, homo-sociality and academic conventions, tropes and topoi – notably that of homosocial bathing. And here, at last we find a better example than Durer’s woodcut of an open-air male-bath: Domenico Cresti (or Passignano’s) Bathers at San Nicolo (1600) and the case for linking that and Michelangelo’s studies, the partial origin of all academic studies of the male nude (we are told), to a tradition that explains further what traditions Cezanne was both building on and breaking from in his male nude Bathers (1890). There are many examples of such long duration comparisons – they illuminate for instance the V-legged dorsal view of Caillebotte’s 1844 Man at His Bath. There are traditions of such a stance and migrations from its original meanings – in this case from masculine aggression in war from Pollaiulo Nude Man Seen from Three Angles (early 1470s) through David’s imperious Intervention of the Sabines (1799) to Bazille’s relaxed but manly Fisherman with a Net (1868) [113ff].

The fact that there isn’t a simple synthetic argument but rather six nuanced essays with common themes is a strength here. Thus the discussion of how multiple perspectives of the body seen all around from infinite viewpoints is beautifully tied to conventional themes of Renaissance art. This includes the paragone (the competition for priority) of art and sculpture and then gently inserted into the practices this set up – finishing nude bottoms perfectly even when designed (p.180ff.) for a collector’s inset wall-niche (where that bottom could not possibly be seen). Only in the chapter following this is this convention art-historical discovery segued into issues that queer the clarity of our statements about our ‘love’ of art. Comparing the ‘justification’ of an almost obsessive concern with the buttock in Cezanne with Michelangelo, she says (in a way that allows multiple unsaid motivations of artist or viewer to remain gelid in the air of both artists’ respective centuries):

Although the issue of humour isn’t explored in many later chapters, it fills Chapter 1 (the section called ‘Dirty Talk’ (p.26ff.)) and infects the prose so that every sentence sometimes seems to have a double-entendre or pun about the desirability of the ass, a bit like the one in my title or an exploration of why the butt of most jokes (visual and otherwise) is the butt – whether in a fourteenth-century Flemish parchment anti-clerical illustration or a Newton cartoon of 1797 (28f.).

There is much here that is just straightforward art-historical scholarship of the highest order (even with some of the tedium of exempla that sometimes involves) but there is also much that opens up new hypotheses about why male nudity cannot be conceived without the necessary dorsal views. And the book insists that this isn’t just because of artistic emulatio from Leonardo’s [130] Study of a Man Seen Behind (1503-7) to Rossellini’s [140f] use of the Farnese Hercules in Voyage to Italy (1954).  The treatment of dwarf nudes is splendid (156ff)  and telling and has a lot to do with the nude as something we handle – in reality or imagination (158). There is a lot to be gained from little dips into this book. For instance the narrative that links Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Nudes (1470s) to Signorelli’s use of ‘shapely buttocks’ as his ‘signature (42), especially in the incredible Figures in a Landscape: Two Nude Youths (1488-9).

There is more to say. This is a very good book indeed. Together with Anthea Callen, this has been a great year for re-thinking the male nude.

Online pedagogy in art: comparing A844 Block 2 Sec. 2 and Exercises 3.2.2, 3.2.3, 3.2.4 & 3.2.5 in Sec. 3

Having recorded real disappointment about the pedagogy revealed by exercises in Sec. 2 of the course, I was really rather thrown back to find that Exercises 3.2.2, & 3.2.3 merely asked you to read quite short selections of prose. It was my fear that when I revealed Discussion about this reading I would have just been told what to think about that reading.

I judged too soon. They didn’t. Indeed they were a model of what online learning and teaching using computer-revealed feedback might be.

I think the reason I did not expect that is that Section 2 provides exercises used computer-revealed feedback that read as the ‘correct’ answer of the exercise task. I believe, maybe in part a pedagogic prejudice of my own, that such a strategy achieves, obviously unintentionally, the hidden educational agenda of lowering learner expectations of their own role in deference to a notion of the always reliably scripted authority of teachers and textbook writers. Indeed these ‘feedbacks’ even patronise the learner into believing they are they picking up a skill that, in the context of spectatorship in painting, always reveals the correct answer. Take this example from Ex. 2.5.4 (on Chepstov) Edwards says: 

This instructs me as a learner that what is being taught is a script ruled by a dominating idea or principle that educated teachers, tutors or writers have but that I don’t have (yet). Hence I can be expected to do the easy ones with clues in the right places but not more challenging ones – like the one to follow on Caillebotte. No doubt this is a laudable kind of mentorship or apprenticeship approach but it rather translates any academic discipline that can be taught that way to a kind of technical exercise.

But in these early exercises in Section 3, this is not what I find. I read through the pieces – right up to 3.2.5 (and a bit further) before going for the reveals so that I could preserve some integrity as having at least contributed to the comprehension of the passages (from Aurier, Barr and Greenberg twice respectively). I found that satisfying. 

However having now returned to the revealed feedbacks I had clearly misses some of the sophistication of the digital pedagogy in this section. The computer-revealed feedbacks were not attempts to impose authoritative readings of the texts learners like me have read but amplifications of points in the texts and then application of these amplified ideas to stimuli (examples from visual art) and to the histories of art that can be unfolded from the implications of the texts.

This is to say that these feedbacks did not primarily make me check my understandings against an expert tutor but took my understandings, added them to those of the expert and developed them. That is, I felt herein cognitively involved – ‘I too (was) a contender’ (sorry Marlon) in academic debate. This has a lot to do with the management of tone and hence relationship between digital writers and their audience of learners. It maintains authority but does not impose or substitute expert readings for those of the learner. Notice how the prose addresses you as a thinking subject – something we, at least subliminally, must register:

Notice the pedagogic power of that phrase ‘you were thinking’ in which the addressed is built into the rhetoric and hence the argument and the refined art-historical language it introduces. It empowers me. This is the effect (even in the much shorter feedback on Barr) in fact because the prose does not substitute its own understanding for yours but develops understanding by adding to the context of the original quotation, so that the reader is taken on a journey of comprehension rather than having their comprehension checked.

In Greenberg examples whilst a first revealed feedback does check comprehension to some extent, its tone is that of collusive meaning-building that corrects by sharing the onward movement in a thoroughly shareable co-learner’s language, by opening with something near to colloquial style.

When it is more teacherly, it is because it communicates ways of reading language in sophisticated (and not-to-be-assumed ways) as in the revealed first feedback in 3.2.4.

In both of the second revealed feedbacks new stimulus art-objects are introduced so that again we feel we are carried forward intellectually rather than contemplating our own performance as a novice. It works by assuming some kind of more equal partnership in that journey introducing technical terms as it precedes:

I am going to really enjoy Section 3. I can see that.

Steve

Observing a Curator’s Tour: Laing Gallery with Curator Amy Barker regarding her curation of Exposed: The Naked Portrait on 21^st November 2018

For Gallery information on curator-tour format click here. For more information on Exposed, click here.

The purpose of this reportage is to think about art-curatorship following a reading of O’Neill’s (2016:42ff) history of curatorial discourse since the late 1990s[1]. Charting a period now in decline when curation that took on the subject-position of the creative auteur curator-artist, it shows how curation now might now occupy the ‘critical space’ abandoned by art criticism. Curators were to become curator-auteur-critics, O’Neill quotes Liam Gillick:

With this in mind I took myself  on a visit to hear the public tour (small fee over internet) by the curator of this exhibition, Amy Barker.  There is no catalogue for this exhibition (unfortunately). It is a reflexive and situated (in terms of the current holdings of the Laing) recuration of an original small exhibition (of 12 pieces only) by the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). This meant that important works like Gilbert and George’s In the Piss took proximity to wonderful holdings in the Laing from Bloomsbury (contrasting nude males by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell for instance) that are part of the Laing’s glory.

There was however no sign of anything like full authorial control in Amy’s presentation, even though she made it plain that selection, grouping and ordering of works was both a curator’s responsibility and privilege. Descriptive schematisation of groupings and porous boundaries between the groupings was also continually asserted. Moreover, although Amy’s name never appears in the Galley material to indicate her ‘ownership/authorship’ (and I am not saying that is how Amy sees herself), it was her decision (no doubt subject to teamwork even at planning) to start the exhibition with Clark’s distinction between the ‘naked’ and the ‘nude’. This distinction is somewhat blurred however in the following sections. Moreover, there is some sense of the complexity of the way nude models were rejuvenated by new uses -  with the growth in the nineteenth-century, for instance, of nude models, especially ecorché (flayed) models, for the use of medical/anatomical study. 

Nevertheless there is a useful dialectic set up from Clark's loose distinction about the status of the nude as ‘art’ or something other, whether that be objective medical study, pornographic voyeurism or a philosophy of the human subject. The latter was favoured by artists such as Duncan Grant, whose attempt to balance eroticism, art and a philosophy of the ‘human’ is mentioned en passant in the labels to an oil portrait of the naked mountaineer, George Mallory (whom Grant also photographed (not though in this exhibition) much more suggestively) as a philosophy that linked sexuality to Praxiteles and Plato.

Hearing a curator is fascinating since one sees that statements about curators as critics primarily are always partial. Barker’s nuanced ‘talk’ showed her balancing equally important priorities including mediation between a ‘public’ gallery and a potentially censorious ‘public opinion’ about the limits of artistic representation (possibly tested most by Gilbert and George she felt) and the economic practicalities involved in the optimisation of the use of a Gallery’s own resources in exhibition-making. Curation is not an easy job under conditions of reduced spending of course and we do curators a disservice if we see them primarily as frustrated art critics. But critique there certainly is – at its most interesting in the comparison of how portraits are constituted between artist and sitter in Morley’s Christine Keeler photographs (for taste click here)  and how poses become means of creating a pose-stereotype that can be used critically (in reflexive re-use for a naked Joe Orton, Barry Humphries and a non-naked ‘Edna Everage’). These issues illustrate not only technical innovation in art but also the meaning of the exhibition’s title – what it means to be ‘exposed’ in terms of human publicity and vulnerability. Speaking of which one found oneself unable to take one’s eyes away from Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘David’, which queries artistic interest in Davids and is a startling innovative portrait in video of David Beckham (click here for grainy reproduction by an exhibition-goer (not me) part-video).

This line of talk – of curatorial critique - also looked at some splendid postmodern and feminist inversions of the trope of the female nude and Barker concentrated on these, although I was itching to ask why she inserted between such exempla the massive Gilbert and George.

The balance between female and male nudes is there but I would have liked this to be theorised. Indeed it is likely that privately it was thus theorised by this impressive curator but again let’s diverge from O’Neill’s thesis. It is her privilege as a curator to stay silent about such theorisations. It makes the ‘spectator’s share’ in ‘co-curating’ the more spacious and all visitors such be grateful for these spaces.

There is another chance to hear Amy Barker on this topic. Please take it. It’s worth it. If not – go to the exhibition. It is full of treasure. Appended to it is ‘Dressed to Impress’ which use clothed portraiture to point the issue of how signification occurs in portraiture and why (even if we prefer our figures fully clothed) we need to reconsider the Naked Portrait.