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Bruno Latour's Introduction to 2005 exhibition: Making things Public'

This is a note to self really but worth sharing, since this 2005 article came to me as a complete surprise and consolidate thoughts I've had spinning around a long time but in inchoate form.

The essay is:

From Realpolitick to Dingpolitick: or How to make things Public Available 

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/96-MTP-DING.pdf (Accessed 20/11/18)

The linked issues I want to note, perhaps for later use, relate to Latour’s complex presentation of issues of representation (that combine the ideas of political and mimetic representation) and the nature of a true assembly (whether that be a matter of composition or democratic politics).

1.     Representation & Assembly:

I’ve noted pp. 6, 14, 16 and 25f.

Here are some quotations (no synthesis as yet in this tired old brain):

‘Procedures to authorize and legitimize are important, but it’s only half of what is needed to assemble. The other half lives in the issues themselves, in the matters that matter, in the res that causes a public around it. They need to be represented, authorized, legitimated and brought to bear inside the relevant assembly.

… (6)

2.      Representation

…bring together two very different meanings of the word representation that have been kept separate in theory although they have remained always mixed in practice. (6)

Questions we address are to the three types of representation brought together in this show: political, scientific and artistic. (14)

Then read on.

Politicians sell a problem (re – thing). :

…to the general public under the name of a faithful, transparent and accurate representation. We are asking from representation something it cannot possibly give, namely representation without any re-presentation, without any provisional assertions, without any imperfect proof, without any opaque layers of translations, transmissions, betrayals. Without any complicated machinery of assembly. (16)

Iconoclash

3.      Assembly

To assemble is one thing: to represent to the eyes and ears of those assembled what is at stake is another. An object-oriented democracy should be concerned as much by the procedure to detect the relevant parties as to the methods to bring into the center of the debate the proof of what is to be debated.’ (7)

& note things imply both unity and division around their meaning and application.

The point of reviving this old etymology is that we don’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement. (13)

At the centre – the Ding: Heideger-ian ‘gatherings’

If the demos is such a welcome solution, it’s because it also divides into two. A paradox? No, it’s because we are ourselves are so divided by so many contradictory elements that we have to assemble.  (14)

What would a truly contemporary style of assembly look like. / It’s impossible to answer this question without gathering techniques of representation in different types of assemblies. …

One of those attempts is to design not one assembly but rather an assembly of assemblies, so that much like a fair, visitors or readers can compare the different types of representation. (21)

AND NOTE THE Double-edge of composition here – representations and assemblies!!!!

… as if we could abandon for good the task of composition. There must be some alternative to cheap universalism …. (25)

NEEDS WORK!

Exterior Space & Internal Perspective, Masaccio’s Trinity A844 Ex 1.5.2

1.     Go to Columbia Univeristy’s MCID to view a panoramic virtual image of Santa Maria Novella

2.     You want the interior that contains Masaccio’s Trinità (Figure 1.2); this is titled ‘Interior: Nave Panorama’

3.     Facing the main altar of the church, move to the left until you are in front of Masaccio’s Trinità (Figure 1.2).

Consider how the artist has treated space in the painting and in relation to the church interior.

Also consider the relationship between the individuals depicted. How is it similar to or different from the chapels and their paintings near it?

5.     Now do a search for ‘Masaccio trinity’ on ARTstor.

You will find a number of images, including a perspective diagram that demonstrates how Masaccio created the perspective.

I had a go at this exercise but rather floundered with the prospect of using the virtual environment as a means of relating to interior space. It made me feel that the answer could only relate to the experience of digital space which is so disembodied. Relating to space is surely about proxemics of a kind that can’t be equivalence in virtual tour technology – and that includes sense of one’s own and other people’s body motion and a whole raft of sense impressions other than just the visual. The whole idea is interesting but has to be about the digital and virtual – where surely space is a different phenomenon as is time and motion.

So I thought I’d examine the pedagogy here instead – jumping to the attached Discussion and the learning goals identified in paragraph 2. Here is a very strong reading of the distribution of imagined space through the iconic use of perspective that is very Panofskian. Every aspect of space in the Discussion is treated therefore as contributory to a unitary meaning that celebrates the institutions of church, state and private wealth – including ideologies of hierarchy and necessary mediation. I have no doubt that this accords with contemporary Renaissance thought patterns but it fails to teach us to look at the signs and symptoms of space (the visual and two-dimensional ones at least available through the exercise. So this is what I thought I would concentrate on in the interests of my own autonomous learning.

My point generally is that course such as this MA SHOULD be sharing and facilitating this aim rather than ending up in one-way feedback. Of course, to be fair, this may be being done in the Forums. But I’ve chickened out of that space of chat and enforced intellectual constriction.

The sentence that does potentially point us to autonomous thought for me is this: “Through the use of illusion, the painting acts both as a chapel (architecture) and as a painting.”

This opens up the question of space that for me is vital in comparing visual and proxemics issues in the two stills on this page.

Of course the perspective from the virtual tour is unusual – only one of those moving body parts take in as they assess a picture and its spatial environment – but the contrasts are telling. The elimination of God the Father in reflected light may be a phenomenon related to the reproductive media, as indeed the reflection of the back-lighting in those tremendous arches of intersecting light that frame and highlight features of the painting. The reflected arc touches the smaller painted arc in the painting and can seem visually to radiate from, rather than on, the Godhead. It is hard to know how much this is an effect of introduced extraneous lighting necessary to the digital performance of this tour and how much from lighting effects that reflect circumambient everyday lighting and architecture. Moreover in the Renaissance lighting would have been another thing altogether and certainly not regular in the way modern lighting obediently can be in the interests of performative meaning-making.  

But what is clear is that the relation between the artefact as a painting and its perspective-created reflection in two dimensions of three-dimensional surrounding architecture is far from complementary (in either sense of the word). Even the momento mori to the base insists on this. The internal deceptive depths of the Trinity are clearly still a picture to any gaze and this is captured by the fact that not only does its internal architecture reflect the external but that it uses the external architecture to emphasise its very ‘framed-ness’ as art. The parallels of frames (arcs and parallel faux columns make Masaccio’s contribution competitive with the art of the church itself, ensuring that we attribute to Masaccio a creative power akin to the church architects and builders together and to God the creator with His Hands supporting the structures of pain, suffering and acceptance so endemic to the Christian message.

Masaccio has built and supported the crucifixion itself, the prime sculptural architecture of this piece. The balance of hanging from and supporting the structure of the Church is, I think, integral to the piece. This is stressed in those wondrous painted capitals to the painted columns. But it is not the sole meaning of the art, which depends on many perspectives. For instance see how the Masaccio ‘human’ contrasts with the gilded cross on the ornate pulpit in its proximity, from another less direct perspective. My view is that Masaccio’s framed architecture questions the pretension of its surroundings and the potential artifice in its purposes (whether Masaccio ‘intended’ that or not).

The paragone represented by this piece is that the painting unlike the real building represents the spirit not just the body – the Holy Ghost almost missing from the pictured Trinity. This is an excellent religious affirmation and honours the Church of his day but it is also a display of Masaccio as creative genius, using context, audience and space to ensconce and embellish his own art.

As the discussion says, “A lot more could be said about this painting”, but the point is not increasing the volume of commentary pedagogically but opening up debate qualitatively between learners facilitated into autonomy, at whatever stage. These kinds of end-staged discussions, feeding into a pedagogic system dependent on one-way feedback only, as OU is thus dependent currently, are dangerous signs of a learning institution not looking to its central purpose but instead to the structure of higher education currently and uncritically.

The idea of making ‘publics’ post-Habermas. A844 Ex. 1.3.4.

Return to your notes about the public (from 1.3.1) and contemplate whether your ideas about the public and its historical shifts have changed after reading Habermas and, if you had the time, after listening to the Making Publics introduction.

I decided to read also: Introduction to Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe—Performance, Geography, Privacy Steven Mullaney and Angela Vanhaelen (2013)

My earlier ‘notes’:

Public in these examples (‘public opinion’ and the ‘public sphere’) is used adjectivally in which case it appears to invoke its binary antonym, ‘private’. Yet a private opinion whilst functioning in a similar binary relationship with public opinion is not the sole or probably the main usage of the term ‘public opinion’. As a known ‘the public’ might in part be synonymous with the ‘public sphere’ (or even ‘public domain’ but not quite, since it implies other spheres or domains. The public seems to name a ‘thing’. In that latter sense it relates to notions of the communal. But it isn’t the same either because we can’t define public without its binary private. In fact, the public is a splendid invention for capitalist and other societies where privilege, ownership and wealth are unequal. To talk about the public is to imply, and perhaps defend the notion of the private particularly in relation to issues of ownership, entitlement and access. This is so even where private means ‘subjective’ and ‘secret’ or ‘reserved’, although the relationship between meanings is nuanced. We have public entrances only to distinguish and justify the need for need for private entrances. We train administrators of bureaucracies and large enterprises ‘deal with the public’ since that ‘sphere’ needs to be constrained lest it or any part of it feels it has a right to demand access to what is reserved as private. Public then is a constrained or constricted area where the public is maintained in prescribed or permitted roles that do not allow the appearance of either the private or fully communal, where the private is perceivable as unnecessary.

Of course, these like all definitions are historically specific and will vary according to numerous historical and other factors. The major one here may be the discourses available to any period which may generate neologism and then vary the meaning of generated words by varying its contextual uses by the forces of conventions, accrued practice or ‘rules and laws’. The notion of multiple publics may emerge when we talk of specific groups.

For an image ‘having’ or possessing a public, seems to me a vague concept. In a sense here ‘public’ may suggest a determining bottom-up force that helps create or sustain an image in its present form and interpretation. This might be true of the ‘image’ associated with celebrity, although ere as elsewhere the determining factors are probably much more complex. But it could be applied to religious images or images of gender, race, disability and so on. In that sense are some 'publics' more influential and / or entitled than others. Do women for instance have public entitlement over images of them or are images of women as we have them in current society the possession and entitlement of those who use and abuse them, maybe men. The possibilities are endless.

The image is unlikely to have force to determine its public alone, since it feels impossible to attribute agency to an image. But the point remains that some images do have agency attributed to them – from religious icons to pornography. Is this a function of how those susceptible to that belief (in the magical power of the image (Freedman) become that images ‘public’ (those Catholics who visit Lourdes for instance or even followers of celebrity).

Returning to those (now green) notes is sobering. They were written in ignorance of what was to come and are therefore tangential to the narratives that follow in the course, although these too have multi-directionality. I benefitted from reading the Habermas essay, and more from continuing reflection, in terms of ideas about representation, which are still growing. The relationship between power, images and representation is obviously central to all the questions but I’ not at the point of articulating any of the thousand ideas that are spinning around rather disjointedly.

Other than that Habermas doesn’t offer much that might be usable. I was pleased that my notes anticipated some of these criticisms, although obviously not in the form of developed arguments, especially the hunch about ‘multiple publics’ (in the zeitgeist and its discourses anyway). My access to this idea comes from a long-life in the complex relationships between the politics f different publics of which I could be said to be a member. Some hints of how these ideas link to representations and images appeared, without me knowing it at the time, in recently sent-off TMA01. For instance, Burra seems to represent imagined communities by charging imagined space between figures as charged with interactional meaning. For me this says something about the relationships between art-objects, ‘publics’ and curation-spaces.

However, this material on ‘making publics’ is ever-so-important. Watching the video was time-consuming and I need to get to more to it. There are great quotations on ‘public spheres’ (Mullaney & Vanbaelen 2013:3):

There are even more feelers outwards in ibid:5 –

This is very rich. Again, it recalls how I used Anderson in relation to ‘imagined’ LGBTIQ+ communities.

Of course, these like all definitions are historically specific and will vary according to numerous historical and other factors. The major one here may be the discourses available to any period which may generate neologism and then vary the meaning of generated words by varying its contextual uses by the forces of conventions, accrued practice or ‘rules and laws’. The notion of multiple publics may emerge when we talk of specific groups.

For an image ‘having’ or possessing a public, seems to me a vague concept. In a sense here ‘public’ may suggest a determining bottom-up force that helps create or sustain an image in its present form and interpretation. This might be true of the ‘image’ associated with celebrity, although ere as elsewhere the determining factors are probably much more complex. But it could be applied to religious images or images of gender, race, disability and so on. In that sense are some 'publics' more influential and / or entitled than others. Do women for instance have public entitlement over images of them or are images of women as we have them in current society the possession and entitlement of those who use and abuse them, maybe men. The possibilities are endless.

The image is unlikely to have force to determine its public alone, since it feels impossible to attribute agency to an image. But the point remains that some images do have agency attributed to them – from religious icons to pornography. Is this a function of how those susceptible to that belief (in the magical power of the image (Freedman) become that images ‘public’ (those Catholics who visit Lourdes for instance or even followers of celebrity).

COURSE PROVIDED Discussion

In what follows, we will consider some of these questions in relation to historical shifts, and of course in relation to the image.

Habermas’s seminal book examines in depth the emergence, brief flourishing and decline of a bourgeois public sphere, which was based on rational-critical debate and discussion. For Habermas, it was specific circumstances in the eighteenth century that allowed for a new civic society to emerge: new markets and commercial arenas; new spaces such as the coffee house where news and matters of concern were exchanged, discussed and critically engaged with; and novel forms of publicising news and debates in the emergence of the newspaper and journal. (For our concern with the image, the use of satirical prints to critique authority, often found in those publications, is especially relevant.)

In Habermas’ words:

It is important to note that for Habermas the bourgeois public sphere is a historically specific phenomenon, created out of the relationship between capitalism and the state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and thus relying on a largely Marxist interpretation of this time period. Thus, for Habermas, it was tied to changes that saw the solidification of the middle class into a ruling class. The other key idea is that the public sphere has a ‘two-sided constitution’, which for Habermas is about the ‘quality or form of rational-critical discourse’ and the ‘quantity of, or openness to, popular participation’ (Calhoun, 1992, pp. 4–5).

All of this might feel a bit unfamiliar to you, but it will start to make more sense as you read the rest of this subsection and Habermas’s text.

Regulating the View: Who gets to go high? Looking from the Tall Building (1): The Shard

This room of our exhibition will explore pictures from a particular high place but will focus on the work of non-professional photographers, who Garret names ‘urban explorers’ (UE for short), whose aims in making photography is not primarily the production of an art-object but of an experiential record at some remove and considered as secondary and inferior to the experience thus recorded. Indeed this goes for the word-pictures of the experiences as well as collateral photography. This group is described by Bradley Garrett (2013)[1] who underwent ethnographic fieldwork with that group as a participant observer.

McKellar (2018) conceptualises The Shard as an example of a contemporary ‘viewing platform’ (3.2.1) that has emerged as an offshoot of the ‘blow up’ (3.3.2) of the London skyline. A deregulated City has spawned it seems a new ‘iconography of elevation’, and with it commercial practices that sell experience of that ‘elevation’. Hence the existence of an enterprise that whose brand and process is deeply involved with the ‘View from the Shard’ selling a group of commodities predicated on a common interest on that ‘view’, especially at ‘night’ when the prices rise. We need only vicariously experience a group of screenshots from The Shard website[2].

The word associations are clear – heights, luxury and the feel of the superhuman sensation, of going ‘further than the eye can see’. Gilbert (2010) is happy to see such experiences, together with the larger democratic potential of the internet represented by that global conglomerate Google as accessing a new means of satisfying the ‘pleasures of the imagination’ in an aerial vision that is freer and more democratic than that of the past. And it may do that, in the same way that the cult of the ‘celebrity’ in contemporary culture harnesses the identifiably ‘ordinary’, or the identifiably ‘common’, with emotional material that justifies the presence of hierarchy and freedom from mundane control from the top as a phenomenon of nature. The experience is one in which the democratic base of society justifies the experience of luxury, ‘high’ living and great prospects as one that belongs at the top and which it sees only irregularly and at cost and succumbs to its imaginative charm before it returns to where it belongs, nearer the bottom.

In a sense this is the Apollonian vision – it justifies an ordered hierarchy and sees its beauty as a reflection of the comfort at the top they temporarily occupy. That is why it is not, as Gilbert suggests, Dionysian – it threatens no-one and, in the end, votes to sustain the status quo. Those walls of glass are still walls and emphasise by virtue of the reflections they sustain an interiority that is smugly comfortable able to project its satisfaction into the outer world and to constitute ‘aerial views’ as things of a framed beauty. The external architecture supplies such frames which also hold up this structure – are the means of an uncommon but temporary elevation (of emotion and thought – ‘further than the eye can see’). From here ‘order, organization, and visual coherence’ of the external world is provided by the framing architecture and the comforts invisibly provided by its services. Of course from inside to outside the supporting architecture that holds up the curtain wall of glass must seem like a frame that protects and shelters.

This way of seeing things is therefore in danger of losing the nuanced view of the iconography of elevation McKellar proposes, though which she also questions as perhaps far from ‘offering true accessibility’. To get back to nuance we might need to look for a true Dionysian experience of a view from the Shard. I’m looking for this in the section of the exhibition in photographs by non-professionals of forbidden views from the top. Urban explorers as described by Garrett (2010) are people who refuse and deny rules that restrict their access, even when these rules are based (or rationalised depending on your attitude) by the health and safety of the ‘public’. Urban explorers penetrate depths unseen by others (parts of the disused Underground, sewers) and heights that take you to fear and privation, if also excitement, rather than luxury and comfort. As an example here is a poor reproduction of an unattributed photograph showing Garret (2018:2-4) in action as a participant urban explorer observer, pulling:

“… myself to the end of the counterweight (on the roof of the Shard) and peered down over the edge, down to the River Thames where the permanently docked HMS Belfast battleship looked like a bathroom toy.

The key picture is this one again unattributed and untitled. It shares with the other a sense of being framed in such a way as to make its frames conscious to us – bring a message of ‘I am just a photo inadequate to the experience I record’. This deliberate refusal of being art suggests that the photograph of object attempts a kind of neutrality between the viewer and the true artistic experience, unmediated views bought at the cost of transgression, danger and hard labour. This, if anything is the Dionysian that Gilbert only whimsically aligns with a person at home in high flight across London on Google. This is transgressive. We have no comfortable place from which to evaluate it as viewers.

A queer approach to sexual preference labelling in art-history (Queer theory and Interdisciplinary Histories): Intermezzo. Reflecting on: Callen, Anthea (2018) Looking At Men: Anatomy, Masculinity and the Modern Male Body.  New Haven & London, Yale University Press

Coming across this kind of excellent scholarly work necessitates a pause and reconfiguration in one’s thinking. This ticks many boxes for me.

First, it locates queer theory in interdisciplinary historical discourses – those namely of medicine, art-education, psychosocial norms, especial of masculinity class and race, although many more art-historical narratives impinge – issues relating to the definition of image and its relation to meaning (iconographic , naturalistic, conceptual and formal-historical), proportionality & aesthetic form and formlessness, ideologically contextual as opposed to positivistic theories of the ‘ideal’, notions of self, identity and diversity, the history of discourses of sports and war and, of course, the shift to a multi-disciplinary grasp of ‘anatomy’ in the nineteenth century.

This will be a necessary struggle for me however I begin to focus in on a topic, since the nude throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century requires this grasp of different disciplines which shape its meanings. But then so does ‘queer theory’  since it depends on an awareness of the specificities of the binaries which shape gender in any culture in space and time and the means by which these binary explanations of reality are established, maintained, challenged and survive challenge. The homosocial is made up from historical disciplines which in the nineteenth century mean things like the definition of concepts like ‘professionalism’ as well as normality and ‘appropriateness’ to norms. Of course however much I focus, that focus will be on a work, works, movements or artists or an artist but these questions will remain multiple ones and require attention, or, at least, awareness.

Callen’s book tries to look at the shift from the male nude as classical ideal (and the role of the Academies therein pace Edward Lucie-Smith) to naturalist ambitions to draw a statistical norm based on a theory of body economy (and its side-kick) efficiency which animated the work of art theorists and practitioners, as well as masters of male, health and physique and, of course, theorists of eugenic improvement.

She looks at works I see as central – Bonnat’s and Caillebotte’s nudes and briefly at Cezanne’s and other ‘bather’ motifs – but never really centrally to her argument. There are however very fine readings of paintings, whose importance I had not realised or guessed (or perhaps been even remotely aware of) such as Francois Sallé’s The Anatomy Class at the Ėcole des Beaux-Arts (especially in the brilliant reading that traverses pp. 130 – 139). Here class, the homosocial, age, profession, class, sexuality, envy and desire discourses intersect each other in a way that can ONLY be admired..

Yet love this book as much as I do, it sits and stares with a Sibyl-like stare at the dangers it flirts with of a discourse that doesn’t quite add up to  a single thesis, however many fascinating (established and novel) arguments it sets running. I look sometimes for more links between the excellent historical writing and research – on the modes of capturing dynamic motion in photography for instance in science and art schools (a lot to learn here) – and the main tenor of the argument. Likewise the book keeps returning thinly to the representation of women in homosocial contexts in ways that don’t seem to have space to be made solid.

On the other hand some comparisons seem profound despite being met en-passant, such as the brilliant comparison of the labouring bodies of coal carriers in Gervex and Monet, for instance (179f.), whilst other art-objects definitely needed more definition (such as Dalou’s La Fraternitie from the 10^th arrondisement Marriage Hall – the most perfect kiss (p. 181) between two male nudes I have ever seen (in art or out of it). I also wanted more awareness of just how ‘queer’ (antagonistic to norms) is George Lambert’s Chesham Street (1910 - corrected. Thank you Ekaterina) on p. 123 but little is said. This is an image everyone must puzzle over.

Queer theory often liberates from intentionalism and the ‘intentionalist fallacy’ but this is not the case when Callen speaks of Etty’s Wrestlers (a painting I love (p. 87)), which to me is full of much more ambivalence about ‘racial’ categories than she allows as well as normative mid-Victorian racism.

One of the most useful bits of learning for me is the role of the flayed nude écorché model, which links my interests in Titian and de Ribera to their fate in nineteenth century anatomical models – especially in holding up a light to the importance of living over fragmented dissected bodies in anatomical knowledge.

Anyone who loves a wonderful enlightening read will love this scholarly book because it is so well written, but to me it is going to cause a lot of headaches. Writing with, and distinguishing oneself meaningfully from, such excellence will be hard work. But that’s life. Thank you, Anthea Callen, art historian, thank you!

All the best

Steve

Being ‘saved for the nation’ A844 Ex. 1.12

(a)   Thinking back now to Colls and Dodd’s thoughts about ‘race, class, gender’, and the notion of ‘critical heritage studies’ introduced earlier:

·        To what extent do you think this has had an impact on what is ‘saved for the nation’ and acquired and displayed by public bodies?

·        Are there examples you can suggest from your own locality, or that have had a high media profile?

1.      My immediate response to this was that I had explored this issues in the University of Leiden MOOC Heritage Under Threat I completed over the summer. The list of contributions is nearly complete in my rather poor contribution to Ex. 1.9. These contributions mainly relate to a given task performed on a chosen example from ‘my heritage’. It was introduced here. The point the course sought to make seems to be that learners explore what ‘my heritage’ means to each one of us. Through these I came to some rather reflexively convoluted conclusions about whether any individual owns any one unitary ‘heritage’. It also, involved thinking about what, in a heritage site, represents ‘my nation’. This site contains (at least):

·        an early ‘British’ (Brigantine?) defensive earthwork, probably much altered by the Romans it was set originally to defend against;

·        Eighteenth-century adit mines, made by families to eke out an income or subsistence.

·        The invisible site of a Chartist meetings by Huddersfield Chartists in the early nineteenth-century;

·        A tower built at the end of the nineteenth century to celebrate the ‘Empress of India’, the Victoria Tower.

·        The site used by my grammar school to focus hill-climbing cross-country runs;

·        A public-house used by people in the sixth-form of my class for safe ‘under-age’ drinking. It was a dive!

If ‘my nation’ then is anything it is a palimpsest – a thing in which has different meanings for different parts of me at different layers of its archaeology and retrospective development. For me,  these indicated issues of ‘race’ (Romans as invaders / colonisers, the limp connection to Brigantines or pre-Roman tribes, the India celebrated by the Victoria Tower in the perspective of the large East-Asian population who immigrated into Huddersfield at the time of my late adolescence), class (imperial against democratic interests divided by class – Victoria Tower  & the Huddersfield merchants who built it by subscription, coal-miners and Chartists and being a working-class council-estate dweller (before the term CHAVS was invented) in a predominantly middle-class grammar school) and gender (given the debates of the problems of identification implied by binary gender and heteronormative forms).

A palimpsest has a number of places where different layers of the past impinge upon one with different resonance through your life and self-reflection.

2.      This is such an example in my view because it links to work done on A843 and for the EMA. There I concentrated on the term ‘place-making’ in relation to the changes to my now native Bishop Auckland following the developments looked at in the preceding A844 exercise example – the attempt by Jonathan Rutter, a City investor and millionaire and highly formal Anglican Christian. His aim expanded since the newspaper campaign referred to in A844. By 2017 Bishop Auckland was being ‘place-made’ in very different wats, with the revival of:

·        Auckland Castle, its deer park (including deer-lodge) and original walled-gardens.

·        A Mining Art Gallery relating to local Durham mines and miner-painters opened 2017 (this was my EMA);

·        A faith museum currently being built behind the Gate House in Auckland Park,

·        A view-point and modern information centre being built in front of Auckland Park Gates (with a view to Binchester Roman Fort – the only developed hypocaust systems still visible in Britain).

·        A Spanish Art Gallery to completed the Zurbaran Jacob and His Sons (originally collected by a Bishop of Durham as a mark of his interest in a Jewish homeland) set and based on lending from the Prado and purchases enabled by Art-Fund.

·        A centre for Visual Art of Durham University.

If this place-making, in part justified by potential tourism-based income, is to be described as teasing out of the ‘place’ Bishop Auckland, some layers of a palimpsest buried at different levels of its past, including the subterranean underground paintings it houses by miners & former-miners. This palimpsest includes class and gender issues (the rooms of the Mining Museum are divided by gender) and even issues of race – the complex history of anti-Semitism in the Anglican Church for instance.

(b)   Here now are some final, very open-ended, questions for you to discuss with fellow students on the discussion forum and your tutor group:

I wonder how much I will use the forum. Through A843, or so I was told in an email by the Course Director, other learners were offended by how much I wrote and my generally strong personal take on things. All I could have said was that this was not meant to offend nor put other people off from shorter, more focused and course-centred contributions. However, I found all that process quite hurtful in the end and I think I may prefer talking to myself in the cyber-void of these blogs. The point is to stimulate my thought. Views from others helps but I’m not getting many, so I’ll just carry on.

Here goes!

·        Do present policies and strategies for ‘saving [works of art, visual culture and heritage sites] for the nation’ reflect the reality of the cultural constituency of the place where you live?

• • Clearly not. I think the ways in which heritage speaks in the Auckland Project represents various heritages and voices within these heritages. Saving Zurbaran takes on a new menu given the purchase through Art-Fund of an El Greco and collaboration with other Durham galleries owning significant Spanish work from the seventeenth century and later – including Durham University. This is best represented by the publication: Baron, C. & Beresford, A. (Eds.) (2014) Spanish Art in County Durham Bishop Auckland, Auckland Castle, The Bowes Museum & Durham University. The constituency is probably largely middle-class, professional & clerical and perhaps academic.
  • This is less the case for The Mining Art Gallery nor for the ‘intangible heritage’ projects that spring from it and are fostered by the Auckland Project such as older miners’ reminiscence grand memory groups, proggy-mat making, course in printing – using Tom McGuinness self-bought printing-press.
  • Local walkers (with & without dogs) in the Deer Park.
  • The range of variety of cultural audiences addressed can be over-estimated but there is more inclusive diversity here than could be predicted when the issue was just saving Zurbaran’s.

·        Is ‘saved for the nation’ now an outmoded concept?

• • Yes. Or it ought to be, although the maddest fringes of Brexit thinking will most surely resurrect it. Cultural mix in Durham is probably near the lowest in the region. Strangely that has fed the survival of nationalist (dare I say, racist) thinking in some quarters – although hopefully that is minimal.

·        If so, should it be updated – and if that is the case, how?

• • Not by simple place-making as explored in A843. Maybe I’d call it – palimpsesting: exploring the visible and invisible heritages of place and their diversities, communalities and interactions. Thus Bowes Museum was bought by the wealth made by one of the cruellest of the private coal companies that has fostered dark memories in working-class traditions. How are these conflictual interactions placed and discoursed. Not simply as a past curator, Frank Atkinson, did in this gallery by including mining memorabilia in the permanent collection, but perhaps by making these conflicts readable across the range of heritages – and including commonalities.
  • In a sense I’d do a repeat of my Castle Hill project for the Leiden university course. It would be a lifetime’s work. So don’t hold your breath.

All the best

Steve

Reflections on Curation and Recurating Across Multiple Mediums of Artistic Production: Based on Matthew Akers, Director (2012) Marina Abramović ‘The Artist is Present’ (104 mins) HBO Documentary Films & A Show of Force.

As I read through A844 material (currently on the theory and practice of curation), I came across a passage in Terry Smith (2012:198f.)[1]. He speaks here of an ‘emergent tendency’ called (by him) ‘recurating’. Here an ‘original performance is recurated with differences that make it not an antiquarian exercise bit a ‘contemporary exhibition. One recommended as relevant to current concerns’. He also calls this ‘double-play’ since the original is evoked whilst being superseded by new concerns. His example is the MoMA retrospective of Abramović’s work, and especially Night Sea Crossing, originally performed with her then husband and arch-combatant, Ulay.

Akers’ film is described by him (in an additional interview on the BFI film) as a recuration of the recuration represented by the MoMA show. We are in an endless spiral of reselection and re-synthesis here where each recuration evokes the one it historicises and reapplies to a new contemporaneity, in part defined by its transition between media, venue, audiences and re-examined ‘lives’. This makes this film a most rich resource for anyone wanting to reflect further on curation and the notion of contemporaneity, including contemporaneity’s composition in part from multiple pasts it reselects for examination.

This makes the film an inexhaustible mine of reflection of how ‘art’ defines itself in and against curation in an almost cyclical fashion as it gyres into the future. Art is the manipulation of bodywork in a frame that is itself framed and then reframed as it urges its relevance on a new contemporaneity. The beautiful thing about the film is the contemplation of art as presence. In the work Abramović sits on a chair for full days over 3 moths whilst visited by museum visitors, who sit as long as they like or dare and just gaze, receiving back a very active gaze from Abramović herself. It is a place where projection, introjection and mutual tensions and attachments within the dyad complete the work in part – although completed over again in the gaze of an omnipresent circling audience, some of which are in the queue to participate more fully. Abramović makes herself consciously into an enactment of the Mona Lisa in fact to show us what portraits might mean and what this self-portrait portends for the future of all participants who reflect and enact it.

Visitors break into tears, experience time differently (even one ten-year old), play the boundaries of participation – one visitor removes all her clothes to be escorted from the scene by security. It is about what art expresses, for whom and by whom. Each emotion is a performative act, such that it might be ‘acted’ AND is evaluated both as an emotional catharsis and a merely beautiful piece of acting. This kind of ambivalence is indeed, Westmacott, her biographer, says in an additional interview on the disc, at the heart of what this artist is and what ‘artistic presence’ (qua Belitung on Byzantine icons) is.

I can’t recommend the work enough. I will view it again and again I think.

All the best

Steve

Ribera’s Nudes –Men Penetrated by Pain: Ribera: Art of Violence Dulwich Picture Gallery (opening 26^th September 2018.

How does the thesis that in the renaissance the nude male was associated with heroic violent interaction between men fare if we look at a key Baroque figure like de Ribera? It certainly links to that, but Ribera’s focus is not on men in relatively equal combat but in the passive suffering of a heroic body-figure under the hands of malign and/or justified torture. Usually this torture involves penetration of the skin and/or flesh – his favourite themes that run through his career being bodily punishment of an extreme kind in which the body surface is ruptured, cut and often manually or mechanically torn. Interest in the cruel mix of torture in which the victim’s bodily responses force him to collaborate in worsening his condition for instance, such as the strappado, but also penetration by weapons (St. Sebastian) or flaying. Ribera imagined different stages of gross torture (especially in the case of St Bartholomew), imagining him in twisting three-dimensional mobility of experience and expression of pain. He loves the moment of the scream through an open mouth – another orifice in the flesh where inside and outside meet in visions of wet (often blood-reddened and wet) rupture. His use of the idea of flaying in butchery emerges in the 1644 Bartholomew and the flaying of Marsyas. The flayer is shown at the minute when, having cut and exposed the flesh from skin (or hide in Marsyas’ case), he uses a hand (yes, even Apollo does this) to push down the patch of skin to expose a fresh wound.

For this reason, de Ribera was considered by Byron and Gautier as a lover of violence for its own sake. Others, including the curators of this exhibition feel that it is a means of communication about the role of senses in the understanding of art, particularly in that art stimulated by the paragone, the demonstration of the competing claims of sculpture and painting in terms of both knowledge gained bottom-up from a range of the 5 senses or in the exploitation of mimetic effects in multi-dimensional space. Ribera’s men in pain are often partially exposed near the picture-plane, whilst the body-in-pain twists in two actual and one virtual dimension (of depth). Pain naturally invites this motion which is caught usually as a stasis torn out of arcs of embodied movement. In the paintings in this exhibition, we see how this affects the picture frame in 2-dimensions as a stretching of the body to fill all available spaces – with bodily extremities reaching out to the ultimate edges of the painting’s frame.

For these curators this exhibition is of art and hence haunted by the head of Apollo (in flesh in the flaying of Marsyas) and as the a captured stone bust of Apollo Belvedere (the bust probably used is also in the exhibition) in a few surprising paintings but especially in his Bartholomew paintings, where the eyes of Bartholomew are contrasted with the dead impassive blindness as the former looks at God in the very physical c1628 version or, more worrying and intensely, the viewer in the 1644 version (for detail see this link). For our curators this proves the intention of meta-discourse in the pictures on the nature of art itself - whether in paragone or colore-disegno debates

Let’s say though that another theme is possible, which is the ways in which the Baroque nude male here transforms the conception of masculinity. No longer are we as interested in the heroic moment of male interaction but in the passive response (in fact a mix of active and passive responses) to violence (rather than of mutual violence). De Ribera appears to value in men the moment of their ability to suffer and endure whilst in bodily torment (where their bodies are penetrated by male social violence and its surface torn from an assumed depth that lies under opened orifices. Moths that scream in silence are such orifices. You can’t perceive them without haptic apprehension, some imagined but embodied performance in the viewer. That is why the surface that is torn is not only of the skin, but in the greatest painting (Marsyas) of the tree bark and the surface paint of the painting itself. The curators are good in their analysis of this in the catalogue.

What in seventeenth-century Milan makes de Ribera the poet of male passive suffering in the body? Of course, the Counter Reformation stress on the pierced body is part of it – in Bernini for instance, but something else is happening. A response o the male body that only in part looks like a return to Northern Gothic dwelling on the torn body of Christ, but in the sense of an artist, whose exposed inside is the sign of art (now based on Milanese art-under-sale and the rise of exhibition selling (as Haskell famously tells us) made men-in-solitary-pain.

For me a strange star in the show is a wizened older man in red and with a clear halo, brandishing a knife in one end and the removed skin with remaining facial features of St. Bartholomew. Make sure you puzzle here.

All the best

Steve

A queer approach to sexual preference labelling in art-history: looking at case studies in British mid-twentieth century art: 7. Curating the Male Nude

The aim of this group of blogs is to look critically at some of the publications relating to gay male artists in the mid-twentieth century. This is in part to begin trawling for a dissertation topic for my MA in Art History. My initial thoughts relate to focusing on one of these artists, although their contexts include each other, their treatment of male nudes in relation to the iconographic, contextual and stylistic features which propose such a subject for art (for some of the choices this will include photography as well as painting) and ‘queer theory’. This will look at the issue of labelling of course, particularly at the important terminology of ‘homosexuality’, which dominated the period. My hypothesis will probably be that such a term was, and remains, a means of marginalising, even to the point of negation, of such art. This blog looks at some reflections on the curation of male nude art collections / assemblies.

This is timely because of the upcoming Royal Academy exhibition, at which the Guardian critic, Jonathan Jones, smiled, because of its aim ‘for “parity” of naked men and women’, raises the issue of how and why the nude is a hegemonic female or male form across various culture & societies. This question has been asked, hence for my first example of curation is a book (perhaps even the sneered-at form of the coffee-table book) from 1998 by the then ubiquitous, Edward Lucie-Smith, Adam.[1]

Lucie-Smith’s final chapter is about the nudes as ‘The Mirror of Homosexual Desire’ and uses the term ‘homosexual’ in a totally unproblematic way. He is aware of queer theory, in its birth-pangs, but sees it, I think rather problematically and dismissively for all involved as ‘an offshoot of feminism’ (174). But his position is more nuanced than this erroneous reading would suggest. Queer theory is based on a belief that the querying of norms in art – representational or otherwise – creates the kind of crisis in signification, even if momentarily and cumulatively, that produces change from beliefs that have become conventional ‘truths’ in the teeth and frame of those norms. i can empathise with the Lucie-Smith of 1998 because at that time gay male identity needed prideful bolstering in those early days of change in legislation and mores that yet has not come to completion. Yet in 2018 we are much nearer. There is weight in queer theory’s insistence that we spend far too long creating binary distinctions between straight and gay, male and female when the issue for all is the regulation of desire and belief

Lucie-Smith (1998:179) also points out the immaturity of our early positions as gay men who used nude images (sparingly) as an index of a desire that must be legitimated and justified. Of the ‘characteristic art of the rainbow coalition’ (the union of left, feminist and identity politics) he writes:

Although the argument about Wojnarowicz does not hold water held next to that Artist’s achievements in what is quintessentially QUEER ART, his point is sound and made clearer through the chapter. We do not make the male nude usefully into a possession of the gay community. What he (187) sees as more hopeful (and I agree) than that aim is that the: ‘meaning of male imagery seems to be becoming more ambiguous,… the male nude as a subject for art is currently going through one of its periods of radical transition.” This is a description, whether he calls it this or not, of queer theory in praxis, much more so than some of his own appealing photographs (John and Richard 1997) that bothy eroticise and, concomitantly, emotionalise relationships to and between gay male nudes.

Where this book is still valuable is in its perception that male nudity becomes radical when it is contextualised outside the normative – alongside domesticity in Hockney for instance (142), or in relation to the proud nudity of males with a disability (126f) or where gender roles themselves are brought into question, without recourse simply to the substitutive conventions of drag (132f). How much more however is done by two books representing more recent exhibitions in Munich and Mexico City.

These modern exhibitions are represented by two books / catalogues of exhibitions (three if we account for the version of the second one that is written in French and dealing with the exhibition when its focus was much more purely European[2]): for the Leopold Museum in Vienna (2012) & the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) (2014)[3].

The Munich exhibition probably remains of the exhibition and exhibition-catalogue of most use for me if I go with this subject and I have already used it to talk about male nudes in Ingres and Etty in A843. Its curatorial focus however is strongly on literary-visual-political discourses of masculinity with a stress on essays on sources in metamorphic poetry (17ff), negotiated identity in space (27), sexual semantics (37f.) after Winckelmann (an excellent 2 chapters 57 – 76 being on that influential figure himself). It opens with issues of decency and ends with the sublimations that made the nude the model par excellence of Nazi statehood. This curation has an obvious intent – to cause introspection about the nature of German concern with the politics of the male body.

The French Cogeval exhibition is in part represented again in Mexico City but the contrasts between European and South American iconology of the male nude is something much more than an additive. Here masculinity is looked at in terms of construction of it in worker politics of revolution as well as nationalistic state appropriations of the nude (p. 44f followed by material on ‘the classical ideal nude’ – also appropriated by the European right in the twentieth century). Nevertheless, this is a very rich source for a consideration of the male nude as iconic image of embodied notions – nature (175f), heroism (93f) and ‘truth’ (139ff.) are obvious ones. But what of pain (207ff.) and desire (231ff.). Here other traditions are important – especially in Spain. So I await a visit to the Ribera exhibition this week in Dulwich. But Renaissance forms are also mighty. I’ve begun to reflect on these but the Royal Academy exhibition this year will help further. The Mexican book also includes material that makes me joyous (especially on Ron Mueck).

 All the best

Steve

How do I represent ‘nation’ visually? A844 Exercise 1.5.3

1 Return to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities  and read from p. 86 ‘The “naturalizations” of Europe’s dynasties …’ to p. 90 ‘… become an “English” language’.

As Anthony D. Smith has noted in analysing Anderson’s impact, ‘mass reading publics in vernacular administrative languages (a kind of “high culture”) were enabled to imagine themselves as sovereign, but finite, political communities, i.e. as nations, through the products of “print languages”. In other words, the boundaries of the nation came to coincide with those of a “print-community”’ (Smith, 1999, p. 49).

1. ·        What, then, are the implications of this for us as historians of art, architecture, design and visual culture rather than the printed word?
   
2. ·        Are those bodies tasked with saving art and built heritage for ‘the nation’ in fact dealing in easily recognised stereotypical constructions – and what are the implications of this for the use of public money to fund their activity?
   

2 With these questions in mind, look carefully at the following work by contemporary Scottish artist Calum Colvin: Anger (1993).

Figure 1.1 Calum Colvin, Anger, 1993, cibachrome, 37 x 46 cm. British Council Collection. Photo: Bridgeman Education.

·        What aspects of national identity or an ‘imagined community’ of Scottish (and/or British) nationhood are being interrogated here?

·        The reproduction is difficult to see and is not clear to me how much the visual elements are meant to be contra-distinguished or to merge. Thus the anachronistic elements, such as pictures of kilted battle set against Campbell’s soup tins and a McDonald’s printed logo may be intended to have relation to one visual scenario, or one (the older-fashioned one, may be overlaid on the other. The McDonalds logo may be on a painted flag that has been damaged in battle or may be a logo seen through damage done to a visual overlay of ideological Scottishness (fighting men in kilts) in an underlying set of images. But of course both McDonald and Campbell are important clan names in Scotland as well as global brands of a modern visual world. In fact here we have a complex setting of Americanised ‘Scottish names’ with a kitsch fiction of their origin in Scots as ‘tribal’ emblems. Is it that historical diversity in Scotland is being reduced here to the commodified standards of globalisation?

If there is a flag holding up the McDonalds logo, its pole is made of one of the many marks that scar the surface of the painting. Is it a pole or a scar on a picture surface or a terrestrial perceptual effect caught in static time? Are these marks shooting trails from bombs in modern warfare or again just damage done to the Scottish scene that has been painted? Even some visual elements seem to me ambiguous or liminal. Of course there is a bridge (a good boundary metaphor), river, loch and mountains, but is that a desirable built dwelling at the other side of the river bordering the loch or the forested mountain background I sometimes see it as.

 ·        Where, is it suggested, do challenges to/appropriations of this perception of the nation come from?

·        I think the answer I suggested above is probably what is wanted here. The appropriation of Scottish culture is by global USA culture which now uses English as its print-medium.

However there is an appropriation too of Scottishness by a very male myth of Scotland – the same that generated Braveheart. A very masculine aggression subverts all else at both sides of anachronisms we see here, involving too a kind of appetitive sexuality in which flesh becomes meat. I do not know what to make of the object, if such it is, in the bottom right of the picture. It seems organic and animal and has several layers of what look like teeth but could be stones, which advance on the fighting men. It has a queering effect on the picture – an effect that fails to allow us to find norms by which to interpret itself.

·        How are they presented in visual form?

·        I expect I will be totally off-key here. I think the issue here is that norms by which we interpret visual objects, such as outline forms, stereotyped colour relationships, visual proto-typicality (as a cognitivist might see it) are all compromised. That we cannot know for sure WHAT we are seeing, or that what we see changes as we take in diversities across a wide range of object-form, spatial-temporal, dimensional (depths versus surfaces) and tactile ambiguities and liminalities. There is even a play I would say between visual pleasure and disgust (that object I mention above with the potential to ‘teeth’). Of course what must happen is that form has become difficult to regulate. It is difficult to see how such a picture is ‘composed’ – its rhythms and  so on – and I suppose I feel before it a kind of radical discomposure in which images are uncertain to interpretation, and perhaps to recognition.

·        I have given a very driven interpretation of this. What shall I see in ‘Revealed Discussion’ (which makes it sound like the Revelation from the Gods – the breaking of the seals)? Let’s go and look.

·        In fact what is revealed goes much deeper than I did and is better because it knows and uses discourse about the materials used and compositional techniques. I have to say, that constituted real learning for me. I’m gratified. I* won’t add though so that other people, if they chance to see this, get the revelation from that discussion that I did.

Image or Object: Saving Mae West’s Lips for the Nation – or an example of 1930s interior design work A844 EX 1.3 First Draft

The next part of the exercise will involve OpenStudio. …

·        Conduct an image search for one of the works that you have identified as being ‘saved’ following a successful campaign.

·        The search took place on 18^th September 2018 and started in the latest edition of Art Quarterly, to which I subscribe. A number of items attracted me but the most relevant to the discussion that is current in the relevant page was The Mae West Lips sofa from Monkton House (1938) by Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and his most important British patron, Edward James (1907-1984).

·        Go to OpenStudio and to My Exercises, Block 1, Section 1, Exercise 1.3, Saved for the nation.

·        This is a draft prior to access being given tro Open Studio because I like to be in control of my own learning to a high degree – more than the course specifies. Certain decisions will be made about what and how I submit to Open Studio. It may be:

• • An update of this
  • A new project slightly more off-beam that reflects either:
    • My own interests
    • Work towards a dissertation theme.

• • For further pictures from various angles, (including full V&A authorised physical description as wello as details and viewpoints accompanying one above from V & A
  • The Mae West Lips sofas in drawing room of Edward James's Monkton House

·        Make this slot visible to your tutor group.

·        In final OS draft but already visible here (in OU blog) to them and can be accessed via my Twitter account.

·        Upload your image to the slot.

·        See above.

·        In the slot’s description briefly describe the campaign that ‘saved’ the image you have selected.

The ’campaign’ here is difficult to describe as such, although national newspapers used government press briefings which indicated that a temporary export bar was placed on its sale by the Arts Minister John Glen as a result of lobbying from cognoscenti near to the art establishment. These articles (see Guardian November 17^th) express the probable loss of the item should the asking price for the item (over £497K including VAT) not be found before May 1918. The minister talked about the piece as ‘iconic’ and ‘unique’: the ‘single most important example of Surrealist furniture made in Britain’. The stress on the link to British manufacture was important. It is valued in terms of its representativeness as an image or icon at one level (at this level this sofa was not unique – there were 2 identical sofas at Monkton and one was already sold and 5 had originally been made, with variations according to identified sites of placement, for the commission for Edward James. Hence this was not the only sofa representing Dali’s conceptual image, which James had asked to be made from his knowledge of Dali’s conceptual print (now in the Chicago School of Art), Mae West's Face which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment, 1934–35. There is a famous one in Dali’s theatre-home in Figueres, of course.

If this sofa was unique is that it was torn from its context and re-designed collaboratively by patron and artist such that features matched the interior furnishings of the drawing room of Monkton House, James’ residence. The black tassled embroidered fringe in particular (looking little like the embroidery upon the epaulettes of a picador … or matador, ’ was added to match the room designed by Lutyens in 1902 and containing by 1930 a mélange of Victorian, Edwardian and Surrealist ‘styles’. No doubt the Spaqish fantasy was a pleasing concoction of both makers. James’ participation involved too lengthening the lip to make for more functional seating.

Once the sofa was saved it was more common to see its uniqueness as a ‘fascinating piece of interior design history, …’, according to Christopher Wilks, keeper of V & A furniture and textiles. What strikes me is the way in which terms like ‘unique’ and ‘single’ and ‘famous’ can be applied loosely to the ‘great artist’ Dali’s icon of Mae West lips, when the originality eventually is to be found in its role in a object whose design and making was in fact a historically time and space limited collaborative adventure. The Article in Dezeen (27^th June 2018) – the source of much of the above information – helps to clarify this more than I have space for here.

The most telling ‘campaign’ event – with some (rather manufactured) drama is the justification of the export ban based on the deliberations of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), administered by the Arts Council.The ‘drama’ is represented by the debate in the papers about whether the item met the Waverley criteria for considering the item worthy of being saved by the nation. These criteria are as follows:

 The Committee’s function is to consider whether an item referred to it is of national importance under any of the following criteria.

a) Is it so closely connected with our history and national life that its departure would be a misfortune?

b) Is it of outstanding aesthetic importance?

c) Is it of outstanding significance for the study of some particular branch of art, learning or history?

The Applicant, whose interests are in selling the item to the highest (and therefore non-British) bidder answers ‘No’ to all these. The expert submissions counter all these objections in their submission. Issues of importance, in terms of the aesthetic and learning criteria of the piece’s significance relate to ‘provenance’ and the ‘circumstances of its creation’ (its history therefore), which take precedence over the mere object in assessing its value.

Its importance then is not because of the uniqueness of the object per se (there are documented ‘related extant versions’) or its date (it is relatively recent) is a reflection of the history of British interior design and the collaborations / amalgamations that involved.

However it is clear that the Committee was also influenced by the importance of the ‘image’ in the history of art and artistic genius, labelling it, at the end of their meeting minutes, ‘one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of furniture of the 20^th century.’ It is ‘recognisable’ not because of features of its importance in interior design history but because the image is quintessentially attributed to Dali’s genius.

A queer approach to sexual preference labelling in art-history: looking at case studies in British mid-twentieth century art: 4. The Two Roberts (Colquhoun and McBryde)

For contemporary footage, as well as access to the companion exhibition curated by Patrick Elliott see this wonderful short video. 

The aim of this group of blogs is to look critically at some of the publications relating to gay male artists in the mid-twentieth century. This is in part to begin trawling for a dissertation topic for my MA in Art History. My initial thoughts relate to focusing on one of these artists, although their contexts include each other, their treatment of male nudes (or not in this case) in relation to the iconographic, contextual and stylistic features which propose such a subject for art (for some of the choices this will include photography as well as painting) and ‘queer theory’. This will look at the issue of labelling of course, particularly at the important terminology of ‘homosexuality’, which dominated the period. My hypothesis will probably be that such a term was, and remains, a means of marginalising, even to the point of negation, of such art. My probable choice of artist at this stage is probably Keith Vaughan, hence this blog is a start in a later reading project. This blog covers two men, often thought of as a unit and sometimes as a trio. It is critical thought based on reading Elliot et. al. (2014)[1].

First of it is important to see that the work considered here includes no extant male nudes and that moreover clothed figures are often labelled (although not always) older lower-class (or peasant) women, although both women and men have an androgynous look. Many see self-portraits in pictures, especially by Colquhoun, of duos. I do not see the gender boundary-crossing here as either defensive (avoiding identification of a gay subject-matter) nor as mere transposition. Instead, it is clear that gender identity is throughout presented under a cultural sign of acting, masking and performance. In that sense, the two Roberts are nearer to queer and performance theory than any artist I have looked at. Their lives however intersected closely at times with both Minton and Vaughan.

But I also think that the Two Roberts cannot be used as the stuff of rescued homosexual icons. Their relationship to discourses of homosexuality is less evident, if there at all, than in Vaughan or Minton, and other, more political identifications present, however abstracted in their form and activity in their lives, based on their working class and Scottish origins. The two Roberts were known to Hugh MacDiarmid (if only as the ‘wild Scottish artists’ in The Company I Kept) for instances and had defined views of Scottish nationalism and politics on the left, with regard in particular to dispossession and loss. 

It seems to me too that their imagery, especially in as far as it relates to the ‘mask’ is under-researched. I am particularly interested in the difference in facial masks between the two, which seem to me adverted to in the theme of Colquhoun’s wonderful monotype, Mother and Son (1948).

There is too much here for a useful summary blog. However, here is art that would respond to queer theory. Far from trying to derive a narrative of the two Roberts from the pictures, it would be useful to look at how they produce images that queer relationships between figures that forefront acts of representation (mimetic and symbolic) themselves and their assumptions. My feeling is they do this with thought about shadows, reflections and framing – perhaps even framing. An influence here could be Hogg. When we deal with Scottish art - expect that difference!

The blog has done for me what I required for myself – opened up some questions, so I’ll stop there.

All the best

Steve