The Journal of Photography&Culture,in partnership with the Photographers Gallery and the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC)
Writing Photography 5
Dr Tim Thompson: The Importance of the Image in Forensic and Crime Scene Science
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15 February 2011 19:00
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An evening with the Journal of Photography & Culture.
This year-long Writing Photography series investigates different approaches, both creative and academic, to writing about photography.
Drawing on examples, this talk discusses the role the photograph plays in defining forensic science; the influence it can have in the application of justice; and the impact of forensic images in the media.
This talk hopes to provide an interesting exploration of this under-discussed area of the medico-legal context.
Dr Tim Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Crime Scene Science in the School of Science & Engineering, Teesside University. Thompson has published and edited peer-reviewed journals and books on a range of subjects. He is a practicing forensic anthropologist who has worked at home and abroad in a variety of forensic contexts.
Ok guys and girls we shall be going to the Modern British Sculpture exhibition on the 2nd February. Planning to meet outside The Royal Academy of Arts at 1pm.
Letme know if you are coming , we might be able to sort out getting a group ticket which will cost less.
Ether tell me or facebook me .
Good luck one and all for Wednesday
i am quite excited about the gabriel orozco (mentioned by the csm ba sculpture tutor, forgot her name) exhibition at tate modern, his work and writings have been very inspiring to me and i suggest you all (or *we* as a group or, uh, entity) go and see it whenever time allows. he used to work a lot with damian ortega - i assume most of you have been to see "the independent" at barbican's curve gallery already.
anyway click click click here for a review of orozco's tate exhibition (from the independent). there is/was also an interview with him in today's metro (of all f**king places), it's available to read online on the metro website but i barely understood how to navigate it so BLAH. either way, if that wasn't enough, the same very orozco is also showing work as part of the final act of whitechapel gallery's "keeping it real" series called "material intelligence" (more info to be found if you click this different coloured text) - this isn't on until mid march but still should be good, i've been to the other instalments or whatever you want to call them (mona hatoum has an installation up there at the moment if that's of any interest to anyone) and it has been very pleasuring.
anyway, that's me done wasting space on here. see you all tomorrow!
best, jonas
Modern British Sculpture: empire of the oddballs
Inspired by artefacts plundered from around the world, Britain's sculptors, from Moore to Hepworth to Hirst, let their visions run riot. Adrian Searle applauds a heavyweight new show
Certainly not wilting ... a Royal Academy visitor takes in Adam by Jacob Epstein. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Modern British Sculpture opens with a model and some photographs. The model is a three-quarter-size replica of Edwin Lutyens's 1919Whitehall Cenotaph. The photographs blown up on the surrounding walls depict the controversial but largely decorous naked and semi-naked figures with which, in 1908, Jacob Epstein once decorated the exterior of the British Medical Association building on the Strand, and which were removed before the second world war.
Modern British Sculpture
Royal Academy of Arts,
London
Starts 22 January
Until 10 April
Details: 0844 209 0051
The mocked-up Cenotaph is pale, serious, and somehow irrefutable. I have long thought it a great sculpture, with its slightly inclined vertical planes, which, if projected, would meet a thousand feet above the earth's surface. Photographed in grainy black and white, Epstein's high-relief sculptures are naked, grubby with London soot, ruined temporary plaster figures.
Temporary like us. This space has the feel of a mausoleum, a place of death and commemoration. Then, through a doorway, we are tantalised by things displayed in spotlit gloom: a black basalt Easter Island figure, an ancient Egyptian baboon, a phallic woman carved by the overheatedEric Gill. Is this going to be a fun show, or what?
British British Sculpture Sculpture is the title of the essay by curator (and recently appointed director of Tate Britain) Penelope Curtis that opens the catalogue. The same title adorns the essay by her co-curator, British sculptor Keith Wilson at the end of the book. Is it me, or is there an echo in here? One cannot but wonder to what degree this exhibition indicates Curtis's future direction of Tate Britain. It tries to tell one among many stories of modern art, in a limited space, and is no worse for bringing less well known artists and works to the foreground, while ignoring others. And who needs another coffee-table pop-up sculpture show and catalogue of the usual big names?
The show is full of echoes: of ancient African, Egyptian and oceanic art, Greek sculpture, the fragile clatter of Chinese porcelains and Bernard Leach pots, the pomp of Victorian Britain and of the imperialist mindset that filled the British Museum with artefacts from other cultures and other times, influencing generations of sculptors.
Britain bought, looted and collected from the world, wherever navy and empire went. Artists in their turn – Moore to Gill, Barbara Hepworth, the almost forgotten Maurice Lambert and Leon Underwood – stole from the treasure horde in the British Museum, as well as from their European peers. Their demonstrable craft and frequent self-regarding preciosity is wearying. They wished to be original, but mostly turned into mannerists.
Less is Moore
And what, in this entire exhibition, could be more modern or more timeless than the 4,000-year-old neo-Sumerian stone, a great, grey, carved weight like a giant, weather-smoothed pebble, whose form is neither more or less than that of a sleeping duck? It declares without trying those perennially ancient and modern dicta about "truth to materials" and "less is more".
Going through the show I thought less Henry Moore would be good, too, but I suppose he is unavoidable. The Sumerian duck also finds an echo, much later on, in a single-bar electric fire whose backplate has been snipped into the form of a yellow fish, a tench swimming in the grate, byBill Woodrow. Next to the Woodrow is a small, worrying sculpture by the late Lucia Nogueira, a polished Coke can connected to a length of rubber tubing. It's almost nothing, but takes on a disconcerting air of human plumbing, a desperate surgical experiment in connecting insides and outsides, the world with the body, and a thing to a wall. Nearby,John Latham does something inexplicable with plaster, paint and books. Its like a head exploding with ill-digested words.
Also included here are a few more recent examples of key European and American art – a Jeff Koons basketball exactly half-submerged in a fishtank stands near a huge Damien Hirst vitrine. This is just an aside about influence, but there's a real conversation going on between Carl Andre's 1966 Equivalent VIII, his once-notorious bricks, Richard Long'sline of white lumps of chalk from 1984, and a 1966 work, a wall-bound cast of a patch of London wasteground, which itself includes stray bits of brick rubble, by the Boyle Family. But maybe it's too nice, too neat a conjunction.
There's nothing nice about the Hirst, with its flyblown, abandoned picnic-table lunch, a barbecue with rotting steaks, maggots and flies heaving among the charcoal, the cow's head leaking blood under a chair. The horror! The horror! At least the Koons is clean. Nearby, a small Urs Fischer sculpture dangles in mid-air, half an apple and half a pear conjoined at the end of a length of nylon fishing line. We are being reminded, once again, what British art owes to both the past and to bloody foreigners. Fischer's sculpture is forbidden fruit. But we've all tasted it now.
Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria, 1887' by Alfred Gilbert. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
What connects Albert Gilbert's Jubilee Memorial (1887) to Queen Victoria andPhillip King's mad, somehow Batman-like, purple Ghengis Khan (1963) in a room called The Establishment Figure? Is it form (both are essentially conical) or inadvertent sculptural stupidity (both are comical), or is it that both Queen Victoria and Ghengis Khan were emperors? Gilbert's Queen ignores Ghengis Khan, and stares unamused through a doorway towards the huge balls and semi-engorged penis of Jacob Epstein's Adam (1938), in the next gallery. Phew, you say, and go for a quick restorative lie down on the hessian-covered bench that, a wall panel tells us, "is here to offer temporary repose to a wilting public". Adam's certainly not wilting. The text goes on to inform us that the bench disrupted "the quite different aesthetic occasion of Anthony Caro's solo Whitechapel exhibition in 1963". What's with this arch wit? Who needs it?
But we do need Caro, and his great, bright-red steel work from 1962,Early One Morning, has a gallery all its own. I always think of this as a figurative composition – a cross-like figure at one end, a sort of red blackboard or mirror at the other, with various complications occurring inbetween. This reading is of course antithetical to the high,Greenbergian modernist terms that Caro adhered to when he made the sculpture. But there's no accounting for what an audience might think, ignoring an artist's intentions. Once, Caro was seen as the world's most radical sculptor. Then minimalism and arte povera came along, with their mutually incompatible boxes and grids, their poetry and images. British art learned to live with them all.
What – and whom – is omitted or ignored is as interesting as what is included. Certain important aspects of British sculpture are missing altogether. What of the Geometry of Fear, Britain's answer to French postwar existentialism and angst? There's none here. No tortured bronze and steel. No British pop sculpture, no systems art or British backing-into-minimalism-via-constructivism and other routes. There's noEduardo Paolozzi, no Elizabeth Frink, another thankful omission. Tony Cragg is here, but not Richard Deacon, neither Anish Kapoor nor Antony Gormley, no William Tucker, no Rachel Whiteread. Perhaps they are dispensable to the story of British art's struggle with modernity. We move instead away from sculpture as a fully embodied object, or one that wrestles with big ideas and grand themes, towards fragility, impermanence, an anxiety of making things that count.
Modern life is empty
In any case, it isn't always easy to distinguish major from minor, the canonical from the curiosity, mainstream from backwater. There are millennium-old Chinese ceramics here that could have been made yesterday, and new things that look antedeluvian. And nothing ages quicker than the temporarily modish. Liam Gillick meets Julian Opie (Ah! The gleam of aluminium, the emptiness and disaffected estrangements of modern life!) and a little Rebecca Warren homage to Helmut Newtonand Robert Crumb – all legs and bums and vulvas. Some things were never meant to co-exist, but they do.
For much of the past century – let alone beyond – British art has been secondary on the world stage, however Moore, Caro and Hirst have been lauded and reviled. We are good at taking other people's radical advances and extreme positions and taming them, effecting peculiarly diplomatic compromises on unruly foreign extremes. We Brits domesticate other people's art. We are good at oddball individuals though – from Gill to John Latham, Richard Long to Sarah Lucas to Richard Wentworth – whose own takes on modernity and their times are as distinctive as they are eccentric. They also, this show posits, might be important in ways some of their better-recognised and more lauded peers, smooth operators on the international stage as they may well be, are not. In the end you have to ask yourself what matters. Modern British Sculpture is only temporary. One day it will all be old.
We hear from leading artists working with the moving image - Christian Marclay whose celebrated 24 hour film Clock, is a play on time.
Tacita Dean, committed to the traditional medium of film, describes her roots in pictorial image making and her love of celluloid.
Gillian Wearing discusses her ambivalence to narrative and acting in her new cinema film Self Made. We capture the spirit of artist filmmaking at a screening of films on the platform of Hackney Downs station, where the context of the screen is important to the films shown.
We also hear how Isaac, originally a cinema film director now shows in gallery spaces, working to break down the barriers that exist between different artistic disciplines - film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture, trying to unite these into something he calls a visual narrative.
We discuss the role of the Film Council, BBC and the BFI in working with artists to produce innovative films in Britain.
We chart the rise of artists working in film, moving out of the shadow and the constraints imposed cinema film making.
Producer: Kate Bland
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4.
Simon Starling: Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)
16 December 2010 - 20 February 2011
Francis Alÿs, Francis Bacon, Christian Boltanski, Matthew Buckingham, Harry Burton, Tony Carter, Keith Coventry, Andrea Fisher, Stefan Gec, Ernö Goldfinger, Graham Gussin, Susan Hiller, Douglas Huebler, Des Hughes, ISOKON / Marcel Breuer, Patrick Keiller, Hilma af Klint, David Lamelas, Liberty & Co., Sean Lynch, Mary Martin, ...more
The highly regarded New Contemporaries exhibition is a snapshot of today's emerging art landscape featuring 49 artists working across film, sculpture, photography, painting, animation and performance. Offering unparalleled access to new practice and ideas from across the UK, this exhibition sits at the heart of a dynamic and discursive programme of discussions, workshops and performances for both artists and audiences.
Established in 1949 and presented at the ICA between 1964 and 1989, New Contemporaries is a high-profile annual event offering art students and recent graduates essential recognition and support at a crucial stage in their development. A panel comprised of influential arts figures, predominantly artists, selects participants through a rigorous process that is open, fair and democratic.
The selectors for 2010 are Gabriel Kuri, Mark Leckey and Dawn Mellor
Gallery Tours
Gallery assistants introduce the exhibition Wednesdays to Fridays at 2pm. Meet in the ICA Reading Room. Free. Guided tours by exhibiting artists on 5,12 December and 9,16 & 23 January.
The Serpentine Gallery is delighted to present Philippe Parreno’s first solo exhibition in a UK public institution. Born in 1964, Parreno rose to prominence in the 1990s, earning critical acclaim for his work, which employs a diversity of media including film, sculpture, performance and text.
Parreno’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery has been conceived as a scripted space in which a series of events unfolds. The visitor is guided through the galleries by the orchestration of sound and image, which heightens their sensory experience. Noise from Kensington Gardens and from the surrounding streets can be heard inside the Gallery, as though the outside is leaking in. The blinds come up to reveal a sudden change of weather. Taking the exhibition as a medium, Parreno has sought to redefine the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent ‘object’ rather than a collection of individual works.
The show features the UK premiere of Parreno’s latest film, Invisibleboy (2010), the story of an illegal Chinese immigrant boy who sees imaginary monsters that are scratched onto the film stock. In this filmic portrait, fantasy and social realism, fiction and documentary overlap. June 8, 1968 (2009) recalls the train voyage that transported the corpse of assassinated senator Robert Kennedy from New York to Washington D.C. Kennedy’s invisible body and the Invisibleboy are characters that float between several layers of reality. Set in Asia, The Boy from Mars (2003) follows dimming points of light and reflections of the sun, before lingering on buffalo tied to a purpose-built structure containing an electricity-generating machine that provides the power required to make the film.
Whether through the cinematic image or the exhibition itself, Parreno explores and manipulates contemporary signs in all of their hallucinatory reality.
The Serpentine exhibition follows a series of related but distinct retrospectives of the artist’s work presented at Kunsthalle Zürich; Centre Pompidou, Paris (both 2009); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009–10); and the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York (2009–10).
Philippe Parreno AC/DC Snakes, 1995-2010
Electrical plugs and adapters
The British Art Show is an ambitious touring exhibition of contemporary British art. Organised by the Hayward Gallery, the show takes place every five years and tours four UK cities. This year, the exhibition is visiting London for the first time in 21 years, featuring work by 39 artists including Sarah Lucas and Roger Hiorns. 16 Feb-17 Apr
This major Royal Academy exhibition is the first dedicated to modern British sculpture for 30 years. The show includes work by top British artists including Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Damien Hirst. The display uses provocative juxtapositions, encouraging you to see the works in a new light. 22 Jan-7 Apr
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall with more than 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds for this year's annual Unilever Series. Past commissions have included Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor, Louise Bourgeois' giant spider sculpture and Carsten Höller's slide. Until 25 Apr
World-renowned sculptor Anish Kapoor once again creates a sensational London exhibition – this time in the open spaces of Kensington Gardens. Kapoor's series of imposing stainless-steel mirrored sculptures are gathered together for the first time in London, reflecting the luscious surrounds of the Royal Park. Until 13 Mar
TrAIN Open Lecture LAURA MULVEY IN CONVERSATION WITH GRISELDA POLLOCK
| CHAIR: SUTAPA BISWAS | Wednesday 26th January, 5:15pm Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)
This event is part of the TrAIN Open Lectures Series and is the fourth in a series of talks organised by Sutapa Biswas at CCW for the graduate programme. The event is in collaboration with the research group, Subjectivities and Feminisms (UAL), and is also generously supported by Film and Video Umbrella (London) and OnFM Radio 101.4.
This event is free and open to all
There will be a post-lecture reception in the Red Room
Laura Mulvey and Griselda Pollock are both eminent feminist scholars, who have through their works, transformed the ways in which we engage with, and understand visual practices. It is over 30 years since Riddles of the Sphinx, Mulvey’s film collaboration with Peter Wollen (1977) was made. This unique event will explore the historical relevance and impact internationally, of feminist film practices on visual culture.
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Mulvey’s essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen, was one of the first major writings that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Mulvey’s writings examined the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism. This seminal work later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures. Mulvey is also author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989; second edition 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). She has made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council 1980), and Disgraced Monuments made with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis (Channel 4, 1994).
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds. She a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. Since 1977, Pollock has been one of the most influential scholars of modern, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is also a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history and gender studies. Pollock studied Modern History at Oxford and History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her many publications include: Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology, London Routledge & Kegan (Griselda Pollock with Rozsika Parker), 1981; Aesthetics. Politics. Ethics Julia Kristeva 1966-96, Special Issue Guest Edited parallax, no. 8, 1998; Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, London Routledge and New York Methuen, 1987; The Sacred and the Feminine, edited by Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron. London I.B. Tauris, 2008.
Sutapa Biswas is an artist, and Reader at Chelsea College of Art and Design, CCW, UAL.
The Event will be recorded for broadcast purposes, by ONFM Radio 101.4
Aphasic Disturbance Curated by Stephen Bury 19.01.11 – 19.02.11 Private View Tuesday 18th January 6 – 8.30pm Chelsea College of Art & Design 16 John Islip Street
London SW1P 4JU Website: www.chelseaspace.org <http://www.chelseaspace.org/> Stephen Bury takes Roman Jakobson’s seminal essay of 1956, ‘Two types of language and two types of aphasic disturbance’, as the starting point for this exploration of artists’ books and artists’ multiples, mostly from the collections of Chelsea College of Art & Design Library, which he built up 1978-2000. Jakobson analysed the similarity and contiguity disorders of aphasics, which can be defined as a loss of power of expression through speech. In the former condition, the patient struggles to begin a sentence unless prompted; sentences are ‘elliptical sequels’ that are supplied from previous sentences available and general nouns can be substituted for specific ones. In the contiguity disorder, the patient loses the ability to make propositions; grammatically functioning words such as conjunctions and articles are dropped and sentences are reduced to singular words. These conditions are reversed out by Jakobson into an axis with a vertical for similarity/metaphor and a horizontal for contiguity/metonymy: he then extends these axes by mapping them onto a poetry/verse and a romanticism/realism divide: ‘A salient example from the history of painting is the manifestly metonymic orientation of Cubism, where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches; the Surrealists responded with a patently metaphoric attitude.’ This exhibition explores how contiguity and narrative operate in artists’ books and multiples, how putting text next to image, image next to image, text next to text, reversing the function of text and image, generates narrative or subverts expectations of narrative. It includes works by John Baldessari, Fiona Banner, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Victor Burgin, Neil Cummings and Marisya Lewandowska, Layla Curtis, Douglas Huebler, Kenny Hunter, Anselm Kiefer, Sol LeWitt, Peter Liversidge, Aleksandra Mir, Dieter Roth, Leanne Shapton, Jane Simpson, Sarah Staton, Daniel Spoerri, and Yoko Terauchi. Stephen Bury has made an artist’s book especially for the exhibition, entitled ‘Strange’, based on the removal of all words except for adjectives from Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’. This is the fourth work in his series exploring metonymy, which began with his samizdat-esque contribution to ‘Volumes of vulnerabilty’, exhibited at the Standpoint Gallery, London, in 2000.
Prof John Roberts, author of 'The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade' and other recent works will deliver a lecture titled ‘Art after Art in the Expanded Field’on Monday 7th February 2011.
The lecture will coincide with the start of a live project and exhibition, In Exchange at the Lethaby Gallery, Southampton Row.
Students from theCSM BA Fine Art's 3D pathway will be making work in the gallery that responds to historical documents, photographs, film and ephemera – including archive material recently brought to light as part of a programme of research into the evolution of the contrasting and radical pedagogies that have evolved in Fine Art at CSM over the last 50 years.There will be a closing event for this exhibition on Wednesday 3rd March2011.
The cube project gave me the opportunity to explore a range of materials and textures but restricted me by keeping the cube theme the same throughout. As shown above I have also worked with the possibility of different sizes and by cutting out a contrasting shape in the middle of the cube itself. Most of these materials pop up in daily life such as masking tape,business cards and wood so it was stimulating working with them. My most exhilarating experiment was the wax cube where out of a simple fabric calico I manipulated it then set it in wax, It has grown to be a great personal interest in linking fabric into my designs, but altering the textures to create a different fabric and texture. My driving force is always to create an innovative design that does not perhaps exist in the public Imagination.
