Royal Holloway, University of London

Faculty Member, Media Arts

Professor

About

My research interests lie in the way in which artists corrode the boundaries between media, particularly within modernism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or use new technologies to extend the analysis of art’s formal rhetoric and the boundaries of subjective experience, as the modernist avant-garde does with film, photography and performance. Recent publications have concentrated on the activity of the Parisian avant-garde in relation to ideas of intermediality and simultaneity in the 1910s and 1920s, including studies of Francis Picabia, Henri-Martin Barzun and Ricciotto Canudo. I am currently completing a book The Noble Dead: Modernism, Mortality and the Trauma of Modernity which examines how modernism responds to death in mass culture through translation and displacement between media and modes.

With the support of the British Academy I am currently researching modernism’s imagination of intermediality, and co-chairing a panel at the 2012 AAH conference 'Modernism's Intermedialities: Futurism to Fluxus' with my PhD students Alexandra Trott and Rhys Davies. Collected papers from this panel will go into a collection to be published by Cambridge Scholars in 2013. My own contribution to this will be a study of Duncan Grant's 'Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound' (1914)

I write regularly on the intersections between contemporary art and historical tradition for the magazine Art Monthly.


Authored Books

Published monographs

Art and Death (I.B.Tauris, 2008) ISBN: 98-1845116637

Francesca Woodman (Phaidon, 2006) ISBN: 0714844306

New Art from London (Thames & Hudson, 2006) ISBN: 050028606X

Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion, (Thames & Hudson, 2002) ISBN: 0500283834

Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking (Prestel Verlag, 1998) ISBN: 379131940X

Edited collections

The Art of Rachel Whiteread (Thames & Hudson, 2004) ISBN 0500285047

The Art of Bill Viola (Thames & Hudson, 2004) ISBN 0500284725

The Art of Tracey Emin (with Mandy Merck) (Thames & Hudson, 2002) ISBN 0500284850

Recent Journals, Academic Collections and Catalogue essays

'Polymetre and Simultaneité: Henri-Martin Barzun's articulation between the Abbaye Créteil and Futurism' in Günter Berghaus (ed.) International Yearbook of Futurism Studies (Berlin, de Gruyter, spring 2012)

‘The Last Hope of Intuition: Francis Picabia, Erik Satie and René Clair’s Intermedial Projects Relâche and Entr’acte’, Nottingham French Studies, 53, 3 (autumn 2011)

‘The Purist Focus: Léger’s Theory of the Close-Up and Les Gueules Cassées’, Angelaki March 2011

‘‘A new dictionary of gestures’: Chaplin’s The Rink and Canudo’s Skating Rink’ in Renée Silverman, (ed.) The Popular Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2010)

‘‘The art I love is the art of cowards’: Francis Picabia and René Clair’s Entr’acte and the Politics of Death and Remembrance in France after World War One’, Science as Culture, November 2009

‘Slave to the Rhythm: Sonia Delaunay’s Fashion Project and the Fragmentary, Mobile, Modernist Body’ in Teunissen, J. & Brand, J. (edd.) The Power of Fashion: On Design and Meaning (Amsterdam: Terra Uitgeverij/ARTEZ, 2006)

Recent Guest Lectures, Seminars and Conference Papers

Feb 22, 2012 ‘391 as Movie Magazine: Francis Picabia’s Critique of Commercial Cinema, Celebrity Boxers and the Call-to-Order’,
Royal Holloway, Dept of Media Arts, Research Seminars

February 25, 2009: Institute of English Studies, Literary and Critical Theory Seminar ‘Picasso's Ghosts: Portraiture, Death and the In-Fidelity of the Mistress’

March 24, 2009: Royal Holloway HARC Seminar: ‘The Purist Focus: Léger’s Theory of the Close-Up and Les Gueules Cassées’

July 2-4, 2009: ‘Back To The Futurists: Avant-Gardes 1909-2009’ conference, Queen Mary College, University of London ‘Abstracted Kinematics: Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound and the future of Kinema in 1914’

PhDs

Most of my doctoral students are working in the area of histories of time-based art and the subjective effects of installation or questions of modernism and ‘new media’. As a practising curator I am happy to supervise PhDs by practice where the practical element is realised as some form of exhibition. I currently supervise six students but with expected submissions and graduations am interested in talking to students who wish to pursue doctoral study from autumn 2012. I look for interests in photography, avant-garde film or sound works, preferably with a close focus on modernism whether in the nineteenth century or the twentieth century before 1939. Given the direction of my future research I am particularly interested in hearing from applicants who wish to work on the following themes:
Theories of time and the modernist avant-garde
Intermedial spectacle in the modernist avant-garde up to the 1920s

As a supervisor I encourage my students to develop their ideas and practices beyond the presentation of the thesis.

This has led, for example, to one of my recent students curating a number of survey shows in the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow in 2007 and 2010. Most of my PhD students present conference papers in their second year and will have a number of publications by the time they take their viva.

You are far more likely to be doing an MA in Art History, Aesthetics, Critical Theory, Literature, Modern Languages, or even Music than you are mainstream Film Studies, which is unlikely to have offered you much experience in the areas that interest me – though if you have had the chance to work closely with avant-garde film you may well have the necessary credentials. Please contact me for an informal discussion if you are interested in doctoral work in this sort of area!


Completed PhDs

Antonio Geusa, ‘The History of Russian Video Art’ (spring 2009)

Tom Slevin ‘The Body in Modernity: Radical Imaginations and Reactionary Ideologies’ (autumn 2009)

Barnaby Dicker ‘Visibly Frame-Based Cinematography: Non Chronophotography and the Reinvention of Cinematographic Art’ (autumn 2010)

Mohsen Biparva, ‘Images of Empire: Lens Based Representations of Self as Other in the Age of Globalisation’ (autumn 2011)

Submitted

Constantine Athanasiadis ‘An Ocean of Images: Representation as Loss of Consciousness and the Unspeakable Properties of Video’ (examination spring 2012)

Current PhDs.

Nicholas Lee ‘Discursive Rupture and Ethics in Modernism: The Case of Marcel Duchamp’

Rhys Davies ‘Emulating the Modern World? Futurism’s “Reproduction” of Sound’

Andrew Johnson, Wyndham Lewis and the Great War

Sarah Fill, Paul Nash: Painting Archaeology, and National Identity, 1929-1940

Alex Trott, Intermediality and Modernist Performance in Paris, 1910-1925


At undergraduate level I teach a second year terminal course on the history of avant-garde film within Modernism [MA2059] and a third year sessional course, Critical Problems in Modernism and Modernity [MA3073], examining ideas of subjectivity and new media (photography, film and radio) in high modernism. .