Royal Holloway, University of London
Faculty Member, Media Arts
Professor
Thesis Title: Remains in Light: The Photographic Imagination in Self-Portraiture from Dürer to Woodman
About
My research interests, and indeed my personal interests, are in the uses of lens and time based media (photography, film, video) outside of the dominant spheres of mass-cultural practice and melodramatic narrative. I’m primarily concerned, from an historical perspective, with the way in which artists make use of these media; whether within modernism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or to extend the analysis of art’s formal rhetoric and the boundaries of subjective experience, as the modernist avant-garde does with film. Accompanying this is an interest (which for me is profoundly political) in the position of the subject (both human and philosophical) in all this, as spectator, as participant, and indeed as maker of art. These interests are analysed within two thematics, Temporality and Death, and read primarily through a historical filter of modernist art, starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century and ending in the 1970s.
Temporality:
I am working, slowly, on a project that examines the theorisation and imagination of temporality in the modernist avant-garde’s imagination of intermediality – from Futurism’s first abstract works films and performances and Ricciotto Canudo’s essays on film as art to the emergence of montage as a dominant mode in the late 1920s.
My interest here is the way in which film - as a medium that almost completely literalises the Newtonian imagination of temporality within a discourse of absolute realism - is received with both scepticism and enthusiasm by modernist artists influenced by the thought of Henri Bergson. Abstract film is one solution to the problems of time and apodicticity, intermediality - the combination of projection with other media - another. Montage, with its concessions to a linear flow of time and photographic ‘truth’ within the single film, is perhaps rather less of a success in its pursuit of modernism’s project than is commonly imagined.
Film seems profoundly at odds both with modernism’s general sense of rhetorical inadequacy in all other forms of communication, and the specifically Bergsonian reading of temporality and the subject in the ideas of ‘durée’ and ‘intuition’. In current essays I’m examining how moves towards abstraction and intermediality attempt to work around these problems. I have recently completed an essay on Picabia’s use of film in the ballet Relâche (1924) as a contestation of the increasingly dominant critical notion, promoted in the avant-garde by the circle around Léger and Cendrars, of cinema as a separate art, and – given the positioning of those artists and critics within a cubism increasingly accommodated to the rappel à l’ordre – therefore also a ‘political’ project. Picabia’s notion of film as a hybrid that corrodes practive boundaries therefore extends and replaces the pre-war Bergsonian based critique of realism in film. This had become deracinated with the post 1918 appropriation of Bergson’s thought to conservative positions that could accept notions of ‘realistic’, narrative film, especially if, like Léger’s Ballet mécanique, those positions emphasised the nobility of the human body within a de-humanising, mechanised culture. (This essay will appear in Nottingham French Studies in 2010 and I’d like to thank the Intermedia Research Group at Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities for an invitation in May 2008 to present some of the ideas that are formalised in this paper: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/29/intermedia-.htm) My interest in Relâche, and associated Futurist works such as Balla’s staging of Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (1917) and the Cubo-Futurist project, The Victory over the Sun (1913), follows from a particular interest in film, theatre and opera: I have been working sporadically for some time on a number of largely unrealised or only partially realised projects devised in Paris in the early 1920s. A study of one of these projects, which was fully achieved, ‘‘A new dictionary of gestures’: Chaplin’s The Rink and Canudo’s Skating Rink’ wil appear in Silverman, R. (ed.) The Popular Avant-Garde (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2011)
I am generally interested in the relation of painting (and therefore abstract film as a mobilised painting) and music in modernism, where music acts as a new measure of time and a source of rhetorical forms. In the summer of 2008 I curated a small exhibition on this topic at a London gallery. http://www.mummeryschnelle.com/pastpages/musicshow08.htm This show was nominated as ‘Exhibition of the Week’ by Time Out, London in August 2008. I’m now developing this as a project in collaboration with a British regional art gallery.
Death:
Following the completion of a recent study of contemporary art and death, I am working through a number of different projects that cohere around different aspects of modernism and the theme of the extension of the indifferent representation and disposal of the subject in modernity from the domain of politics to that of culture through the emergence of mechanical forms of mediation. Chief among these projects is a new book undertaking a closer analysis of specific historical and metaphysical issues related to death and representation from the 1790s until the early 1920s. Modernism and Death: the body, the spectre and modernity will be published by Leuven University Press in late 2010. This project began with a series of journal essays and conference papers, the first of which, an examination of the critical relationship of parts of René Clair and Francis Picabia’s film Entr’acte to the French memory of the dead of the 1914-18 war, and the cultural retrenchment of the early 1920s, recently appeared in the journal Science as Culture (September 2009).
In the spring of 2009 I presented at the Institute of English Studies a paper on Picasso’s paintings connected to the death of his mistress Eva Gouel – a subject that I touch on briefly in Art and Death; this topic was recently developed in a keynote paper for the ‘Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying’ conference, at Birmingham University in June 2009 and will form the basis of the book’s fourth chapter. Other chapters, in addition to the essay on Entr’acte, will deal with Hippolyte Bayard’s photographic self-portrait of faked suicide, Le noyé (1840), Georges Rodenbach’s photo-novella Bruges la morte (1892), and Francis Picabia’s Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère and the theory (and practice) of the death-drive
Forthcoming Projects
I am co-editor of a forthcoming volume of the journal Angelaki with Prof. Andrew Benjamin of Monash University. This issue will be on the theme of ‘the face’ and my own contribution will be concerned with questions of the close-up, subjectivity and reaction (both political and aesthetic) in French film theory and practice of the early 1920s, looking especially at the work of Jean Epstein and Fernand Léger.
From January 2010 I will co-organise, with Prof. Eric Robertson (Dept of French at RHUL), a monthly research seminar on Modernism and Film in the Institute of German and Romance Languages at the School of Advanced Study. This seminar examines the relationship of modernist artistic practice and critical writing to cinema. Its thematic range stretches from film studies through literature, performance, music and art history, encompassing relatively conventional cinematic narrative productions, abstract film and the wider imagination of “intermediality”, where projection, performance and fine-art practice meet.
We are actively seeking proposals for seminar topics.
See http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events/seminars.html?no_cache=1 for dates and speakers
With Lanfranco Aceti of Sabanci University, Istanbul, I am co-editing an issue of the MIT journal Leonardo Electronic Almanac on the theme ‘Speed, Dromology and Invisibility’, starting from the Futurists’ approach to speed and subjective and corporeal fragmentation and dealing with the disappearance of the body, trajectories of self-dissemination and acceleration into contemporary life and the impact of digital culture. A call for papers has been issued and interested parties should get in touch. I am on the editorial board of Leonardo Electronic Almanac, so if you have ideas for other papers, or indeed issues, please get in touch.
With my current PhD student Barney Dicker, I will be co-chairing a panel at the European Association of Modernist Studies, Annual Conference, Poznan, 2010, on the theme of “Chaplin/Charcot”, looking at Charlie Chaplin’s importance as a figure for modernist theory and practice.
Recent Guest Lectures, Seminars and Conference Papers
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’
April 2-4, 2009: Association of Art Historians Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University ‘391 as Movie Magazine: Francis Picabia’s Critique of Commercial Cinema and the ‘call-to-order’’
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 2009. This could be in the fields of art, ethics or history (though you don’t have to be thanatologically inclined) and 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:
Modernism and death, in particular responses to World War One
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 to one of my recent students, Antonio Geusa, curating a number of exhibitions in Moscow, and he will be presenting two major historical survey shows of Russian video art (his thesis subject) in the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow in 2007 and 2008.
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’ (passed spring 2009)
Tom Slevin ‘The Body in Modernity: Radical Imaginations and Reactionary Ideologies’ (passed autumn 2009)
Current PhDs
Barney Dicker ‘Visibly Frame-Based Cinematography: Non Chronophotography and the Reinvention of Cinematographic Art’ (submitting autumn 2009)
Mohsen Biparva ‘Images of Empire: Lens Based Representations of Self as Other in the Age of Globalisation’ (submitting winter 2009-10)
Constantine Athanasiadis ‘An Ocean of Images: Representation as Loss of Consciousness and the Unspeakable Properties of Video’ (submitting spring 2010)
Nicholas Lee ‘Historical Progress in the Rhetoric of the Avant-Garde: Duchamp and Schoenberg’ (co-supervised with Prof. Julian Johnson, Dept of Music)
Rhys Davies ‘Emulating the Modern World? The Avant-Garde’s “Reproduction” of Sound, 1880-1925
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. Central questions here include the modernist impulse to resist vision through forms of occlusion and blinding; the resistance to a culture of linear, ‘Taylorised’ time and space that film and photography might be understood to embody as much as the production line; the consequences of the First World War in producing a horror of modernity’s effects, and the reaction to a notion of the perfectible body that might be seen as characterising, for different artists, the appeals of fascism, socialist realism and consumer capitalism.
Publications:
Recent Journal Essays
‘‘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 and Culture, 2009
Forthcoming Journal Essays
The Last Hope of Intuition: Francis Picabia, Eric Satie and René Clair’s Intermedial Projects Relâche and Entr’acte, Nottingham French Studies, 2009-10
‘The Purist Focus: Léger’s Theory of the Close-Up and Les Gueules Cassées’, Angelaki 2009-2010
Authored books:
Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking (Prestel Verlag, 1998) ISBN: 379131940X
Into the Light: Photographic Printing Out of the Darkroom (with Pam Roberts) (Royal Photographic Society, 1999) ISBN: 0904495175
Sarah Jones (Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 1999) ISBN: 8478009825
Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion, (Thames & Hudson, 2002) ISBN: 0500283834
New Art from London (Thames & Hudson, 2006) ISBN: 050028606X
Francesca Woodman (Phaidon, 2006) ISBN: 0714844306
Art and Death (I.B.Tauris, 2008) ISBN: 98-1845116637
Forthcoming:
Modernism and Death: The body, the spectre and modernity (University of Leuven Press, 2010)
Edited collections:
The Art of Tracey Emin (Thames & Hudson, 2002) ISBN 0500284850
Contributed essay ‘Heart of Glass: Reflection, Reprise and Riposte in Self Representation’ and co-author of introduction with fellow editor Mandy Merck.
The Art of Bill Viola (Thames & Hudson, 2004) ISBN 0500284725
Contributed essay ‘In My Secret Life: Self, Space and World in Room for St John of the Cross, 1983’ and introduction ‘Call me Old Fashioned, But…: Meaning, Singularity and Transcendence in the Work of Bill Viola’
The Art of Rachel Whiteread (Thames & Hudson, 2004) ISBN 0500285047 Contributed essays ‘Lessons from What’s Poor: Monument and the Discourse of Statues’ and ‘Live as if Someone is Always Watching You: George Orwell’s, Rachel Whiteread’s and the BBC’s versions of Room 101’, and introduction ‘When We Collide: History and Aesthetics, Space and Signs in the Art of Rachel Whiteread’.
Chapters in books:
‘Flashes of Light: Diana Thorneycroft’s “Impossible” Photographs and the Possibility of History’ in Keshavjee, S. (ed.) slytod: Diana Thorneycroft (University of Manitoba Press, 1998) ISBN: 0887556507
‘Nan Goldin: Bohemian Ballads’ in Hughes, A. & Noble, A. (eds.) Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative (University of New Mexico Press, 2003) ISBN 0826328253.
‘Everything All The Time’ Graham Dolphin’s Interventions in Fashion Media’ (Art Editions North/University of Sunderland, April 2005) ISBN: 1873757255
‘The Correspondence of Fragments: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Monika Oechsler’s Video Installations’ in Monika Oechsler: Parallel Worlds, (Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz/ Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2005) ISBN: 1899926569
‘Slave to the Rhythm: Sonia Delaunay’s Fashion Project and the Fragmentary, Mobile, Modernist Body’ in Teunissen, J. & Brand, J. (eds.) The Power of Fashion: On Design and Meaning (Amsterdam: Terra Uitgeverij/ARTEZ, 2006) ISBN: 9058975118, now being translated into Chinese and Russian.
Curatorial:
‘The Ugly Show’, Leeds Metropolitan University Art Gallery, July 1998
‘Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion, 1970-2002’ Barbican Art Gallery, London, Sept 2002 - Jan 2003
‘Flicker: Photography Between Stasis and Movement’ Leeds Metropolitan University Art Gallery, Oct-Nov 2001, toured to Lighthouse, Wolverhampton, March-April 2003
‘To Become Like Music’: Painting and Music in Late Modernism, Mummery & Schnelle Gallery, London, July 2008.
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