The potential of destruction in art and science

ABSTRACT

Artist and researcher Neal White argues for the potential role of radical engagements in science by drawing on the work of pioneers of conceptual art: John Latham (1921–2006), Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) in the UK, and György Kepes (1906–2001) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973) in the US. Starting with destruction as a positive force in artistic practice, White examines the ideas developed by these artists as a conceptual framework for thinking through time, chemical process and event structures within the context of the Cold War. In further examining the social context and contemporary landscape of cultural forms servicing science in terms of the communication of ideas, or underpinning further a knowledge economy, he argues for artists to engage science on their own terms, through a renewal of radical practices. This would in turn create new and critically framed work of benefit to culture and society more generally.     

Tradition and the individual talent: remarks on the poetry of Michalis Ganas

Abstract

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (T.S. Eliot)     

John Hewitt’s curatorial eye: art and poetry in the municipal galleries

ABSTRACT

This article examines the art writing of the poet, critic, and curator John Hewitt in mid-twentieth century Ireland and Northern Ireland. Hewitt’s promotion of modern art and artist collectives in Ulster through shifting definitions of internationalism and regionalism will be linked to the art writing of Herbert Read and the late poetry of W.B. Yeats. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to Hewitt’s poetry and art writing reveals the sustained imbrication of politics, poetry and the visual arts in his thinking. Hewitt’s ottava rima poem in response to Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited, October 1954”, will be reassessed with recourse to the context of the Municipal Gallery in Dublin and its mid-century sculpture collections. By identifying artworks within the Municipal Gallery poem, the article illustrates Hewitt’s broader dialogues with the late Yeats and the art scene in Ireland.     

An Artist on Inis Oírr and Inis Meáin: Simon Coleman’s Visit to the Aran Islands in 1959 on Behalf of the Irish Folklore Commission

Abstract

Although the main emphasis of the work of the Irish Folklore Commission throughout the thirty-five years of its existence (1935–70) was on verbal tradition, it also sought, from the middle of the 1930s, to document the material culture of rural Ireland. While this work was carried out mainly by a staff member, the Commission also, in the late 1940s and 1950s, employed an artist, Simon Coleman RHA, to undertake fieldwork for short periods of time in a number of areas in the countryside, assisted by the Commission’s collectors. His task was to make drawings and, where feasible, paintings of traditional buildings, work practices, farm tools and machinery, sea-craft, fishing techniques, and tradition-bearers. This article surveys the contexts in which the artist worked and assesses the contribution that he made to the Irish Folklore Commission’s endeavours to document the material culture of the Irish countryside.     

The Reappearing Masterpiece: Ranking American Artists and Art Works of the Late Twentieth Century

A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the textbooks reveals the source of the pluralism, or stylistic incoherence, of American art since the late 1960s. A persistently high demand for artistic innovation has produced a regime in which conceptual approaches have predominated. The art world has consequently been flooded by a series of new ideas, often embodied in individual works, usually made by young artists who have failed to make more than one significant contribution in their careers. The monumental Spiral Jetty, made in 1970 by a young artist who was killed soon thereafter while in the process of making his art, brought together a remarkable number of the central themes of the advanced art of the time and has become a symbol for that art.     

Art as research: an interview with Liliane Lijn by Barry Miles

ABSTRACT

In conversation with the biographer and author Barry Miles, the artist and poet Liliane Lijn talks about her early influences as a young American artist living and working in Paris, Athens and New York and the development of her practice between 1959 and 1970. She recalls her encounters with prominent surrealists, poets and artists of the Beat generation: André Breton, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and her enduring friendship with Greek sculptor Takis. Inspired by the experimental nature of their works, Lijn explains how her own work focused on research and invention. She describes her Poem Machines as ‘seeing sound’ and explains her growing interest in science and, in particular, light. Lijn details the long and complex gestation of Liquid Reflections, her most well-known cosmic work of the late 1960s, and how working with industry and technology allowed her to increase both the scale and complexity of her oeuvre.     

Turn your trash into… Rubbish,art and politics. Richard Wentworth's geographical imagination

This paper analyses the photographs and installations of artist Richard Wentworth in order to examine his urban imagination and the cultural politics of rubbish that underlie it. In doing so this paper contributes more broadly to understandings of rubbish and material culture, and to geography's attention to artistic understandings and inhabitations of urban spaces. Central to this analysis are the geographies of Wentworth's work, its production, consumption and circulation. The paper attends to three nested sets of practices: the ‘everyday’ practices of people which draw Wentworth's eye, the potential of creative cultural practices for developing critiques of space and place, and the practices of the artist. As a result the paper pushes forward debates around the relationship between geography and art, reflecting on the analytical value of art practice to contemporary social-cultural geographies.     

A very public affair: art meets science

ABSTRACT

What happens in interdisciplinary practices between the arts and sciences? What determines their successes and failures, and how they should be conducted? Here I propose that we can deepen our understanding of them by looking at the role of one specific and, to my mind, vital aspect of many (most?) successful art/science collaborations, namely their presence in public. More specifically, I suggest that museums, having played a crucial historical role in shaping some specialized disciplinary thought, are now well-placed to encourage an opposite tendency towards trans-disciplinary activity. I elaborate this argument by focusing on three characteristics of museums that have made them ideal places to locate art-science collaborations: the role of exhibitions as units of investigation; the ascendency of artist/curators as unusual enquirers; and the enduring value of middle-sized things in these risky initiatives.     

The margin to act: a framework of investigation for women's (and men's) medieval art-making

ABSTRACT

One of the challenges faced by medieval art historians is to recognise the diverse roles women played in matters of medieval art, while seeing also the impact of society on their artistic choices. By tracing how one work of art can open new critical insights into another, and how disparate objects and buildings – if thought through together – can illuminate our understanding of the Middle Ages overall, we can discern the multi-layered stages of the creative process. The term ‘makers of art’ is proposed as a shift away from the commonly used words – artist, patron, recipient – and the preconceived notions about the individuals who fulfilled those roles. The paper also lays out a framework – ‘the margin to act’ – for the investigation of the multi-levelled interactions of women with medieval art and, ultimately, the writing of history.     

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America

Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a ‘life-work model’ employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the ‘artist’ whose ‘artwork’ was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed.

Resemblance to European prototypes is an essential historical reality of colonial artworks: much artwork, particularly the painting, of colonial Latin America ‘looks’ like that of early modern Europe and thus has generated a foundational expectation, laid out in purest form by Manuel Toussaint (Mexico, 1890–1955), that Latin American art history might also look like Europe's. We argue that a mismatch with Europe and its methodologies means that certain, foundational historiographic assumptions about writing art history for Latin America need to be reassessed, in particular the ‘artist’ and ‘artwork.’     

Gustav Metzger: iconoclasm and interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT

Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) has been described as ‘the conscience of the art world’ for the consistently political content of his art and his commitment to political activism on the subject of nuclear weapons, capitalism and environmentalism. Metzger’s artistic output from the late 1950s onwards reflects a theory of art as both aesthetic form and social action and identifies him as a key precursor of activist art. This article considers the inherent interdisciplinarity of Metzger’s practice as it evolved during this early period between the late 1950s and early 1970s in relation to his agenda of social engagement.     

From Imperialism to Internationalism: British Idealism and Human Rights

ABSTRACT

The article provides a historical account of the younger generation of British Idealists’ (1880–1930) approach to international relations and human rights. By focusing on pre-Great War and post-Great War periods, it reveals the shift that occurred in their approbation of T. H. Green's theory of rights. It shows that the Great War put an end to perceptions of the Empire as a plausible and sustainable international order for the younger generation of British Idealists, as it did for the significant majority of liberal British intellectuals. Their work, especially in the post-Great War period, reveals an attempt at translating Green's theory of rights into an internationalist human rights theory, which they saw as being indispensable to maintain a stable international order. As an alternative to contemporary attempts to locate Green's rights theory within the cosmopolitan–communitarian divide in human rights theories, this study draws attention to the younger generation of British Idealists’ long neglected internationalist approach to human rights as a middle way position.     

News and Commentary on the Illicit Traffic in Antiquities

Abstract

In this review article, Dan Hicks works through the approach to “the archaeology of improvement” adopted in the book The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain, 1750–1850 (2007) by historical archaeologist Sarah Tarlow. Tracing the Interpretive Critique of traditional British post-medieval archaeology, the review considers the implications of the book's approach to archaeological practice, especially in relation to materiality, historiography, and geography. Using the volume as a point of entry for taking stock of the significance and limitations of this Interpretive Critique, Hicks calls for a decentring of the Britishness in British historical archaeology.     

American Historical Demography: A Review Essay

Abstract

American historians of modern art routinely assume that after World War II New York replaced Paris as the center of the western art world. An analysis of the illustrations in French textbooks shows that French art scholars disagree: they rate Jean Dubuffet as the most important painter of the era, ahead of Jackson Pollock, and they consider Yves Klein's anthropometries of 1960 as the greatest contribution of a single year, in front of Andy Warhol's innovations in Pop Art. Yet the French texts also show that the French artists' practices and conceptions of art paralleled those of the Americans. Thus, whereas French and American scholars disagree over the relative importance of their nations' artists, there is no disagreement that the most important art of the 1950s was produced by experimental seekers, and that of the 1960s by conceptual finders.     

‘As imperialistic as our masters’? Relations between British and Irish communists, 1920–1941

ABSTRACT

Soon after its formation, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was tasked by the Communist International with assisting their Irish comrades to develop their organisation. This article outlines the relations between British and Irish communists from 1920 to 1941 and argues that, notwithstanding the selfless work of some British communists, the CPGB on the whole exhibited a patronising and paternalistic demeanour towards the Irish that failed to consider the latter’s perspective on an equal footing to its own, even in their own affairs. This attitude, combined with its position within the heart of the British Empire, is indicative of ‘cultural imperialism’.     

Claims to Place: The public art of Sue Jane Taylor

This paper explores the ways through which the public art of Scots artist Sue Jane Taylor and the practices associated with it both unsettle narratives of globalisation and conjure in their stead new narratives of place. With reference to the stories of five works/workings of art—Glencalvie and Borgie in the Highlands, Aberdeen (the onshore site for the North Sea oil industry) and Clydebank, and Lower Pultneytown, Wick—I show how the art, as evidence of a deeply politicised aesthetics, makes visible not only the specificities of historical and contemporary struggle, but is also bound up with creating and imagining new political possibilities. Art and artistic practices are understood not simply in terms of shaping meanings but as constitutive of processes of subject formation and of the ‘becoming’ of place.     

Tom Stoppard’s Big Picture: The Chaos that is Our World

Abstract

Issues arising from discussions regarding the ‘two cultures’ of science and art are many and varied. Tom Stoppard’s very active utilization of science in many of his plays has resulted in his work — especially the quantum mechanics-informed Hapgood and the chaotics-informed Arcadia — being held up as paradigmatic of one science/art position or another. Often, critical approaches to these plays involve a checklist of scientific facts, implying that the goal of such art is to serve as a delivery device for scientific breakthroughs. While plays, novels, and movies of various sorts may have such goals in mind, Stoppard’s plays do not comfortably fill that agenda, critical arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. Neither do Stoppard’s plays show particular interest in engaging any debate about the superiority of one ‘culture’ over the other. In his two ‘science plays’ in particular, what Stoppard offers is an enrichment of both science and art through metaphorical intertwinings that suggest experience is best served when both camps collaborate. The bigger picture that results argues an overlap in epistemology, namely revealing the uncanny similarity in which artist and scientist approach the material that is our universe.     

Towards The “New Rural History”: A Review Essay

The true subject of art history is the succession of innovations that have changed the practices of artists over time. This article uses a survey of illustrations in textbooks to consider not only when in their careers the greatest artists of the twentieth century made their greatest discoveries but also how quickly they made them. The results underscore the dominant position of Pablo Picasso and Cubism in twentieth-century art: Picasso alone accounts for the two best three-year periods produced by any artist, and he and Georges Braque account for three of the best five-year periods, all for the work the two young artists did in creating Cubism. Andy Warhol's innovations in pop art and Henri Matisse's development of Fauvism also rank among the century's most important breakthroughs. In general, identifying the most important short periods of artistic creativity highlights the differing methods of conceptual and experimental artists: great conceptual innovators (e.g., Picasso, Matisse, and Warhol) made their greatest discoveries abruptly, whereas great experimental innovators (e.g., Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock) made their discoveries more gradually. The finding that artists who innovate early in their lives do so suddenly, whereas those who innovate late do so more gradually, adds an important dimension to our understanding of human creativity.     

The cybernetic moment: Roy Ascott and the British cybernetic pioneers, 1955–1965

ABSTRACT

Professor Roy Ascott developed the Ground Course at Ealing College of Art, drawing on his experience of Basic Design under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at Newcastle University. Through his reading of Ross Ashby and his friendship with Gordon Pask, Ascott introduced cybernetic theory into his art practice and pedagogy. This essay explores the degree to which Ascott embodied a distinctly British approach to cybernetics.