Postgraduate Research: Dexter Sinister
June 20, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Afterall issue 27, Summer 2011, themed around notions of mapping and territory, and how they might be used as constructive methodologies.
The work of New York-based duo Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey, University of Reading) may not immediately be considered as territorial or even spatial. However, as demonstrated by their piece A Note on the Type included in the journal, the terrain of Dexter Sinister’s work is the field of criticality and (therefore) of the printed word itself. Writer Saul Anton places their approach within a historical spectrum of criticality and progression; while Anthony Elms provides a ten-point legend towards navigating the ‘space’ between reading and writing in the artists’ work.
Dieter Roelstraate considers the strategy of artist Jef Geys, whose practice attempts an institutional critique from a prosaic and hyper-local perspective. Chris Sharp attempts to deduct an objectifying logic within Geys’s work, explaining his remarkable methodological integrity.
Francis McKee and Jean Fisher look at Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas, whose work ranges from entomological observation to social and political emancipation in provocative arcs.
Andrea Zittel’s designs for living use a specific geographical location as a testing site for her living experiments. Steve Rowell discusses the particularities of inhabiting the Southern Californian landscape, and collaborators Lisa Anne Auerbach and Robby Herbst take a road trip, mapping the vernacular architecture of playgrounds as an homage to Zittel’s models for improved—or improvised—living.
Increasingly in the context of exhibitions, publications and collections, methodologies of mapping have emerged as a means of deducting logic from a spatial or ideological terrain. Stephanie Smith’s reassessment of Suzanne Lacy’s 1995 book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art discusses an overlooked history of participatory practices, while Stephanie Jeanjean’s piece on 1970s French feminist video collectives describes how the spatiality of information exchange became crucial in disseminating new video art. Information exchange, and the validity thereof is unpicked in a historical sense by Michèle Faguet, who considers the fate of East German Marxist-Leninist educators within Phil Collins’s video project marxism today.
Issue 27 can be purchased in bookshops across the UK, Europe and America; find a stockist near you here. For more information on Afterall or to subscribe, visit our website: www.afterall.org.
Opening of Degree Show 2011
June 20, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Degree Show 2011, a set on Flickr.
Images from the opening of Degree Show 2011, June 10th 2011, Department of Art, Univeristy of Reading.
Annual History of Art Postgraduate Symposium
June 18, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Everyone is welcome to join in the Symposium 10.00 a.m. Humanities Building, Room 141
Wednesday 22nd June, 2011 Programme
10.20 Welcome
10.30 – 10.50 Alison Boyd – The influence of Architectural Competition on the Design of Southampton Civic Centre.
10.50 – 11.10 Holly Barton – Images of War on the Western Front in the French and British Illustrated Press, 1914-1918
11.10 – 11.30 Barbara Berrington – Virtually Unrecordable: Filming Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the convent of San Marco
12.00 – 12.20 Nicola Capon – The Latonian Ideal: a consideration of a key sculpture by John Tweed.
12.20 – 12.40 YiFang Chen – Searching cultural identity in digital simulation – Mei Dean-e’s works and post-colonial aesthetics.
12.40 – 1.00 Suriyya Choudhary – Contemporary vs. Colonial gaze
2.00 – 2.20 Youjin Chung – The Unity of Art and Life: the Synthesis of Fluxus and Zen Buddhism.
2.20 – 2.40 Clair Drever – Hermann Nitsch: Viennese Aktionist, cult provocateur and the mysterium of existence.
2.40 – 3.00 Jessica Feather – Collecting Watercolours at the British Museum.
3.30 – 3.50 Rebecca Gill – Galeazzo Alessi and Church Reform: Santa Maria presso San Celso.
3.50 – 4.10 Glenis Kerr Elliott – In Camera: The Radcliffe Camera – Patron and Society.
4.10 – 4.30 Giulia Mezzi: Camillo Boito and Heritage Protection in Post-Unification Italy.
