Universal Museum - universal language? Art historian - curator

Marshal McLuhan’s prophetic vision of the global village is about to be realized. If we are aware of the fact that mass communication reduces the dimensions of our world and makes it more unified and universal, we should take this into consideration when planning the Universal Museum and the language that should be used in it. As curators, educators and museum staff we should not ignore the fact that the spectator/viewer is drawn to the exhibits not only by their own merit, but also guided and assisted by verbal messages, i. e. Labels, brochures. Catalogues etc. Hence, the crucial question is what we, the museologists, use as a means of communication when preparing for a Universal Museum. Should we use pictorial semiotics? This may be a partial solution, which is mainly restricted to objects that can be manipulated and moved by the visitor, as is the case in most of the technological museums. But since the range of objects on display at museums is vast and varied - fine art, archaeological finds, ethnographic objects etc., it may not be the answer to the whole spectrum of exhibits. Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, being an optimist, hoped that by introducing Esperanto to the multi-lingual world population, humanity would be able to bridge and diminish the gap of linguistic differences, thus creating a better understanding between the international communities. Unfortunately this vision was not realized. Esperanto was and still is an utopian and esoteric phenomenon. The barriers between nations still exist although, as mentioned earlier, mass media do help, in some ways, to reduce them.

Modern lovers

Modern Lovers was a survey show of contemporary art practices in dialogue with modernism, bringing together established and emerging artists based in London and international artists from Berlin, Jerusalem and Zagreb. The show features video, film, installation, sculpture, music and performance work that addresses the legacy of the avant garde and the survival of its aesthetics within contemporary culture. In 1976, as punk rock was busy smashing the cultural rubble left behind by the second world war and rejecting the consumer society that had emerged from the ruins, one band bravely announced that it wanted no part in this destruction. Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers sang about how they still loved the old world. Neither parents nor girlfriends could understand, but the decaying inner city with its false promises of progress still held a fascination for Richman, who claimed he wanted to keep his place in this arcane landscape. Punk's assault on culture was the logical conclusion of modernism's linear narrative of art as a force of innovation that must reject preceding artistic movements to establish new ones. Echoing the negations of Dada, it set out to put an end to this narrative, an end to culture. It is partly because of this inherently destructive and totalising side of Modernism that it has come under harsh critique in the post modern era. Nevertheless, we are still caught up in the same dialectic of progress, revolution and destruction. Post modernism has failed to unseat our desire for the revolutionary moment, even as it has been co-opted to the degree of meaninglessness by the discourses of marketing and Capitalism. But, like Jonathan Richman, the artists in the exhibition "Modern Lovers" keep returning to modernism for something else. Instead of taking it at its word when it proffers revolution, they turn to it in search of reform. Still loving the old world and desiring a dialogue with the past, perhaps as an antidote to the eternal present of Capitalism, they are willing to engage with its aesthetics and ideas on equal ground. Leaving behind the ironic deconstructions of post modernism, they find perspectives worth salvaging and juxtapose them with contemporary visual productions. Trading in the grand narratives of modernity for a more personal approach, they don't seek the purity of form that drove the avant garde movements that inspire them but rather revel in adulteration, dilution and contamination of the past by the present". A live performance by sala-manca was sponsored by the British Council and took place May 26th, 19:00. MODERN LOVERS was accompanied by a catalogue (14.80 cm x 14.80 cm) including essays by Avi Pitchon, the sala-manca group and the curators. A discussion panel about the exhibition themes, as well as the catalogue launch,took place at Goldsmiths College's cinema on the 27th of May at 14:00, chaired by Dr. Suhail Malik (Senior Lecturer & Course Leader Postgraduate Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths College) and with the participation of Tom Morton (curator, Cubitt Gallery, and regular contributor to Frieze magazine), sala-manca (artist group), Dr. Amanda Beech (artist, curator and senior lecturer at the Wimbledon School of Art), Matthew Poole (course director of MA Gallery Studies, dept. of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex).

Public Art Commission Rung by Rung, Tina O'Connell

Research based on a significant public art commissions awarded through competition (peer reviewed) – Pearse Street Clinic Public Art Commission (€20K). Research was examining issues of the relationship between sculpture, exchange and communication, health and well-being. The research used an approach to question the aspirations and dreams of those who were visiting the health centre as part of a routine of daily life. Based on the aspirational concerns of individual visitors, and secondary research of positive effects of light, the final output draws on ideas based around the language of physical signage to occupy a space concerned with visitor health and wellbeing – a Health Clinic. The output has had an impact both at the site and more broadly in the context of examining sculpture and fine art as a social catalyst - based on work of socially-engaged historical practices. The installation at Pearse Street work in Dublin in Nov 09 has received critical and local acclaim. Further commissions within the public arena have been forthcoming despite difficult local economic landscape.

The Compositional Aesthetic of Rodolfo Coelho de Souza in Paradise Station: an analysis

This article focuses on the compositional aesthetics of Rodolfo Coelho de Souza (1952-), a Brazilian fine art composer and active researcher, whose concerns surpasses the musical composition isolated from the social communication aspect. This is particularly evident in his piece Paradise Station, which, when analyzed, features the structural depth of its compositional process without disregarding the dialog with the listener and the Brazilian character, according to pitch, rhythm, texture, timbre and dynamics. The present analysis reveals a modular structure based on set classes, worked through a transformation network, which follows the David Lewin model.

Physiological correlates of aesthetic perception of artworks in a museum

Arts experts are commonly skeptical of applying scientific methods to aesthetic experiencing, which remains a field of study predominantly for the humanities. Laboratory research has however indicated that artworks may elicit emotional and physiological responses. Yet, this line of aesthetics research has previously suffered from insufficient external validity. We therefore conducted a study in which aesthetic perception was monitored in a fine-art museum, unrestricting to the viewers’ freedom of aesthetic choice. Visitors were invited to wear electronic gloves through which their locomotion, heart rate and skin conductance were continuously recorded. Emotional and aesthetic responses to selected works of an exhibition were assessed using a customized questionnaire. In a sample of 373 adult participants, we found that physiological responses during perception of an artwork were significantly related to aesthetic-emotional experiencing. The dimensions ‘Aesthetic Quality’, ‘Surprise/Humor’, ‘Dominance’ and ‘Curatorial Quality’ were associated with cardiac measures (heart rate variability, heart rate level) and skin conductance variability. This is first evidence that aesthetics can be statistically grounded in viewers’ physiology in an ecologically valid environment, the art gallery, enhancing our understanding of the effects of artworks and their curatorial staging.

Comparative aesthetics ...

Mode of access: Internet.

The true and the beautiful in nature, art, morals and religion /

Mode of access: Internet.

A series of performances in 'Translating Reviews from 1990: Art Forum'

Participation in group exhibition themed around the 25th anniversary of the Elba Benitez Gallery in Madrid. My work comprised a series of performances in which I translated reviews from the magazine Art Forum from 1990. The performances took place in various locations in London, throughout the run of the exhibition, and were streamed live to an iPad in the gallery in Madrid. I made audio visual recordings of the performances via the streaming media, which located me as the performer alongside the viewers in a single split image. These recordings were then archived in a shared folder held between the gallery and me, and which visitors to the exhibition could access when a performance was not taking place. The work extends my concerns with translation and performance, and with a consideration of how the mechanism of the gallery and the exhibition might be used to generate innovative viewing engagements facilitated by technology. The work also attempts to develop thinking and practice around the relationship between art works and their documentation - in this case the documentation and even its potential for distribution is generated as the work comes into being. The exhibition included works by Ignasi Aballí, Armando Andrade Tudela,Lothar Baumgarten, Carlos Bunga, Cabello/Carceller, Juan Cruz, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Fernanda Fragateiro, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Carlos Garaicoa,Mario García Torres, David Goldblatt, Cristina Iglesias,Ana Mendieta, Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto, Francisco Ruiz de Infante,Alexander Sokurov, Francesc Torres and Valentín Vallhonrat.

Contemporary Art UK (Art World Series)

Adventures Close to Home: the British art scene from “then” to “now” is an introductory essay to the forthcoming Art World Series published by Blackdog to cover contemporary art in the United Kingdom. Previous titles have looked at North America, South America and Eastern Europe.

Contemporary Art UK (Art World Series)

Adventures Close to Home: the British art scene from “then” to “now” is an introductory essay to the forthcoming Art World Series published by Blackdog to cover contemporary art in the United Kingdom. Previous titles have looked at North America, South America and Eastern Europe.

Photography and sociology: an exercise in serendipity

This thesis examines the relationship between photography and sociology as offering complementary ways of understanding ourselves and the world we live in. Drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams, I examine the idea of a ‘field’ of photography within the field of cultural production more generally. The practises of documentary photography, photojournalism and fine art photography are explored with specific reference to images of war. In this arena, the politics, aesthetics and ethics of representing the body in pain are addressed.

Crop

Solo exhibition of sculptural works that use the portrait bust as a vehicle for problematising notions of subjectivity, authority and representation. The exhibition comprised three life-sized figurative busts, each portraits of the artist, sparsely positioned throughout the gallery space to convey a sense of isolation and abandonment. By emphasising the fragmented nature of the bust format by removal of all supports (ie. Socle, plinth or alcove) the works sought to address the vulnerability that frmes this apparently authoritative Enlightenment portrait format. In so doing the exhibition aimed to offer, by example, a new way of seeing and interpreting the portrait bust in history. The exhibition was exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Works fro the exhibition were included in group shows at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. Work from the exhibition was purchased for the collection of MONA, Hobart.The exhibition received favourable reviews in Eyeline, Art and Australia and Machine magazines.

Colonising Shakespeare? : agency and authority in Gregory Rogers's Shakespearean picture books

“You need to be able to tell stories. Illustration is a literature, not a pure fine art. It’s the fine art of writing with pictures.” – Gregory Rogers. This paper reads two recent wordless picture books by Australian illustrator Gregory Rogers in order to consider how “Shakespeare” is produced as a complex object of consumption for the implied child reader: The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (2004) and Midsummer Knight (2006). In these books other worlds are constructed via time-travel and travel to a fantasy world, and clearly presume reader competence in narrative temporality and structure, and cultural literacy (particularly in reference to Elizabethan London and William Shakespeare), even as they challenge normative concepts via use of the fantastic. Exploring both narrative sequences and individual images reveals a tension in the books between past and present, and real and imagined. Where children’s texts tend to privilege Shakespeare, the man and his works, as inherently valuable, Rogers’s work complicates any sense of cultural value. Even as these picture books depend on a lexicon of Shakespearean images for meaning and coherence, they represent William Shakespeare as both an enemy to children (The Boy), and a national traitor (Midsummer). The protagonists, a boy in the first book and the bear he rescues in the second, effect political change by defeating Shakespeare. However, where these texts might seem to be activating a postcolonial cultural critique, this is complicated both by presumed readerly competence in authorized cultural discourses and by repeated affirmation of monarchies as ideal political systems. Power, then, in these picture books is at once rewarded and withheld, in a dialectic of (possibly postcolonial) agency, and (arguably colonial) subjection, even as they challenge dominant valuations of “Shakespeare” they do not challenge understandings of the “Child”.