Tag Archives: School of Arts

MA Literature Review Show 2015: Identity

This post was contributed by Megan McGill who is currently undertaking an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck

The MA Review Show for students of Modern and Contemporary Literature, and Contemporary Literature and Culture, opened up discussion for various pieces of media from recent months, inviting comparison between them in the hopes to spark some interesting ideas.

The items in question were:

Ali Smith’s How to Be Both
The Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Production Line of Happiness’ exhibition
Carol Morley’s The Falling
Channel 4’s The Vote
The webcomic Dresden Codak’s arc ‘Dark Science’.

These items were presented under with the theme of ‘identity’ and discussions were opened after a short introduction for each. The panel included students Karina Cicero, Francis Gene-Rowe, Jenna Johnston, Polly Kemp, and Megan McGill, and was chaired by Dr Joe Brooker, and Dr Caroline Edwards.

Ali Smith’s How to Be Both

Polly introduced to the audience the first item, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, with a 2013 quotation from Frieze Magazine on the idea of frescoes, something that features heavily in the novel, and directly references the artwork from within its pages:

When gods go into exile what do they do? They put on their multi-layered travelling coats and embark on a journey through time. As migrants, they don the costumes of the countries they traverse, until an art work opens up a space in which they can shed their disguise and be free. This is an image Aby Warburg evoked in a lecture he gave in Rome in 1922, to illustrate how key visual motifs pass from one culture to another over the centuries before their dormant potential is awakened by an artist.

The case Warburg makes for Francesco del Cossa’s frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy (c. 1469). They are part of a cycle depicting the months of the year. Seven of the original works have been recovered, including the three that Del Cossa was commissioned to pain: March, April and May. Their pictorial language is as captivating as it is hermetic. Strange characters abound. Warburg defines them as astrological powers governing the months, allegorically embodied by celestial figures from antiquity.

The discussion moves quickly to the fluidity of identity, potentially the most prominent theme in the novel, comparing the text to Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and the work of Jeanette Winterson.

Discussions, however, lead further on to whether our identity is defined by the value of what we do and what we make, linking to an extract from the book where George’s mother asks her if she thinks people should be paid more if they think their work is better than those doing the same work.

The identity of Franchesco as the ‘dead narrator’, something seen before in the work of Beckett, was also brought up in regards to whether her section was a true mystical event, or just George’s imagination spurred by her discussion with H on how Italians from the Renaissance would speak.

Christopher Williams, ‘The Production Line of Happiness’ at Whitechapel Gallery

The next item discussed was the Christopher Williams exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery titled ‘The Production Line of Happiness’. A few members of the panel were able to visit the exhibition. The exhibition is described on the gallery’s website as follows:

Williams’ exquisite prints reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography. Often working with set designers, models and technicians, Williams’ technically precise pictures recall Cold War era imagery and 1960s advertising, as well as invoking histories of art, photography and cinema.

His photographs are elements at play in a larger system including architecture, exhibition design, books, posters, videos, vitrines and signage that investigates the state sets of the art world and the publicity structures on which they rely. From his renowned 1989 studies of botanical specimens, Angola to Vietnam, to the hyper-real colour saturated studies of kitchenware made in 2014, this first survey of Williams’ work in the UK immerses us in visually enthralling and politically resonant lines of enquiry.

The exhibition looks into the dependence of commercialisation in photography, also playing on the idea of commodity fetishisation. Williams removes all negative context (e.g. slave labour) from his images of domesticity, leaving them shiny and yet discomforting in their perfection, challenging the idea of apolitical photography.

Other discomforts are included in the exhibition to forcibly engage the audience, including a lack of captions and hanging the photos below eye level. His catalogue available in the exhibition provides the audience with the captions the walls lack, adding the context that gives his photographs meaning and reinserting the politics into the material.

Williams’ photos are not entirely his own, as he takes photographs of other photographs and recontextualises them through his amendments and captions. This reinsertion of is a method of revealing/concealing, creating a palimpsest similar to the frescoes featured in Ali Smith’s work and editing their ‘identity’.

Carol Morley’s The Falling

Following on from discussion of the exhibition came a trailer for Carol Morley’s The Falling, telling the story of an outbreak of fainting at an all-girls school in the 1960s. Initial comparisons were drawn with Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, focusing on the topics of schoolgirl madness and intense relationships. Many clichés of the genre and time in which the film was set were then brought to light, as well as the elements of a British Gothic tradition e.g. mystery, mysticism, the countryside, spooky music.

Many watchers found the film incredibly farcical and often amusing at times as a reaction of the girls’ hysteria that, in the end, had no real explanation. But did the film need an explanation to serve its purpose?

The most popular element for the audience was the performance of Maisie Williams, whose character becomes a force of nature as the film progresses in a story of self-discovery versus self-destruction. Other positive comments came from the fact of its female director and her portrayal of sexuality in an arthouse film as non-voyeuristic, humorous, and warm at times. This fluidity of sexuality portrayed in the film links incredibly closely to what can be seen in the Ali Smith text, once again focusing strongly on the idea of identity and at what age we become who we truly are. The girls in the film are attempting to become an autonomous female body that feels, through liberated sexual awakening.

Channel 4’s The Vote

After many positive comments on the items covered so far, discussion moved to the less popular The Vote, a live theatre performance broadcasted on Channel 4 on Election Day. Initial disappointed comments highlighted how it focused mainly on the political process rather than political ideas, positively showing the different political motivations of the diverse electorate.

Someone questioned whether in its lack of substance and focus on process rather than politics it served as a perfect metaphor for the election itself, showing what’s wrong with the current political situation. It was also questioned whether its value was undermined by the actual election result the following morning, with the whole programme setting up for a hung parliament when, in reality, the election wasn’t close at all.

Aaron Diaz’s ‘Dark Science’ arc, Dresden Codak

Finally, the discussion moved on to the ‘Dark Science’ arc of Aaron Diaz’s webcomic Dresden Codak. The world of ‘Dark Science’ is one post-singularity, highly technologized and visually stratified, its underbelly in plain view to the reader, dangling across the panels.

As a visual piece it certainly fits the Samuel Delany quotation that the landscape in a piece can be the primary character. Discussion, from this point, expanded to the cinematic technique of the webcomic and how it flashes between narratives, leaving the reader unsure on what to expect next. The look of the comic also reminded an audience member of contact sheets for films, showing everything that has been shot but still clearly conveying movement in a montage-like fashion.

It was noted from the medium of the webcomic is free from the publication format and can be seen in this example as used as a way to educate an audience on science, rather than satirising the subject. The highly technical language used forces the audience to engage, like with the techniques Christopher Williams used in his exhibition, by seeking understanding in the finer details.

On the overarching theme of identity, it was concluded that the main idea of identity in this arc of Dresden Codak was that on ‘when do we stop becoming human?’ in regards to transhumanism and the self-repair using robotics that the protagonist, Kim, undergoes. Is there a particular percentage of body mass that needs to be human flesh, or is there a certain group of criteria you must be able to fulfil? This is the question the audience left with as the review show drew to a close.

Thank you to everybody who came to participate in the MA Review Show, whether in the audience or a panellist, and thank you to both Joe Brooker and Caroline Edwards for chairing such a successful event. The discussions were enlightening and the enthusiasm inspiring.

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Modelling the blush

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This post was contributed by Dr Ben Winyard, digital publications officer at Birkbeck, University of London

Why do we blush and what does blushing signify? Is blushing simply an automatic, physiological response with roots in our animal nature and evolutionary development, or can we interpret blushes to gain an insight into what is happening below the surface in a person’s mind? And which emotions does a blush betray – shame, modesty, anger, desire?

These were the key questions explored by Dr Paul White of the University of Cambridge in his fascinating paper ‘Modelling the Blush’ at the ‘Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’ conference held at Birkbeck from 16–18^th July 2015.

The conference brought together over one hundred scholars to consider how feeling was stimulated, modified and expressed via art and literature in the nineteenth century and how the Victorians themselves understand their feelings. Dr White is a leading figure in digital humanities and the history of emotion and is Editor and Research Associate on the Darwin Correspondence Project, which has made over 7,500 of Darwin’s letters freely available online.

Bell and Darwin: A physiological view of the blush

White began by sketching how emotion became an object of study in the nineteenth century, particularly within the burgeoning field of physio-psychology, the forerunner of many modern scientific disciplines such as neuropsychology.

In the nineteenth century, the new experimental physiology of scientists such as Charles Bell sought to understand the blush in terms of the central nervous system and the dilation of blood vessels. In his Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806), Bell observes that the face contains ‘a peculiar provision of nerves, which are entwined around the vessels, and give them a susceptibility corresponding with the passions of the mind […]. Hence the sudden blush, and rapid change of colour upon slight emotions.’

Charles Darwin was similarly fascinated by human emotions, particularly their evolutionary and adaptive functions, and in 1872 he published The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, which is lesser known than his more famous works but equally engaged with the descent of humans from animals.

Darwin observed and noted the physiological expression of emotions in his own children and began collecting and commissioning pictures and photographs of infants, children, animals and people interred in asylums in an attempt to analyse the universal facial expressions and bodily gestures of particular emotions.

For Darwin, the blush is the ‘purest’ physiological response, an involuntary, reflex action of the nervous and circulatory systems whereby increased blood flow brings a red tinge to the cheek and elsewhere. Darwin was interested in the animal origins of facial gestures and he describes blushing as a uniquely human, but relatively late evolutionary development, firmly aligned with sexual desire and sexual selection – hence its prevalence in the (amorous) young.

The blush as a vehicle of narrative

Conversely, though, the blush has a narratological function and it operates as a literary device and as a vehicle of narrative, which raises it above a purely physiological understanding.

For centuries, the blush has been understood as an authentic external expression or register of inner feeling, including innocence and purity of heart. For all this, it remains ambiguous. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was the novel that provided the main vehicle for exploring the blush’s multiple meanings. White focused on a fascinating moment in chapter 15 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) when Elizabeth Bennet observes an unexpected meeting between Mr Wickham and Mr Darcy:

Elizabeth, happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other, was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting. Both changed colour; one looked white, the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat – a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What could be the meaning of it? – It was impossible to imagine; it was impossible not to long to know.

Here in miniature, then, is the mystery of the blush and the ways in which it spurs us to narratological analysis and speculation. For Austen, the blush is a mark of sensibility, of finer feeling and the ability to respond sympathetically to complex emotional and aesthetics influences, and reading it accurately enables and registers an empathetic identification that is key to social intercourse and human bonds.

Sensibility was a hugely influential idea in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and White went on to consider how skin is a register of sensibility in portraiture of the time.

Narration vs physiology

The Victorian novelist George Eliot was immersed in the latest scientific research of her day, including the evolutionary theories of Darwin, but in her lesser-known historical novel Romola (1862–63) she explores the blush in narratological terms. Set in Renaissance Florence, the novel follows the titular hero as she navigates the intellectual, cultural, religious and political tumults of fifteenth-century Italy.

Eliot focuses on the unhappy marriage between Romola and Tito, a duplicitous, bigamous political manoeuver who betrays Romola’s godfather to his death and fathers two children with a secret wife. In chapter nine, Tito discovers that his adoptive father has been enslaved, but, after comparing his filial duties to his youthful ambitions, he decides against a rescue attempt. However, as he tries to inwardly assert ‘that his father was dead, or that at least search was hopeless’, Tito is unable to repress his ‘inward shame’, which shows in ‘blushes’.

Eliot thus converts the instinctive blush mechanism into narrative; although Tito is unobserved by any character in the novel, the narrator and the reader ‘see’ his moral failings betrayed by his physiological response. For Darwin, though, whatever feelings or narratological meanings are attached to the blush by humans are immaterial and he prioritises the physiological response.

Dr White finished with the fascinating observation that, although the mechanisms of the blush are understood by contemporary scientists, there is still debate on the question of why we blush: you can Google ‘Why do we blush?’ to get a taste of the lively discussions that are still ongoing.

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The language of mourning

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This post was contributed by Andrew Youngson, media and publicity officer for Birkbeck, University of London

“…Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something rich and strange…”

Shelley Memorial, Edward Onslow Ford (installed at University College, Oxford, 1893) (Pic credit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Godot13)

These hauntingly beautiful words, as sung by the ethereal spirit, Ariel, in William Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, tell of the passing of a man from life into death. Rather than describing the process as a simple loss of life, here death is a metamorphosis from a literal state into one less defined, yet no less vital.

Shakespeare’s famous words can be found carved into the gravestone of English romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, which lies in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. The former husband of Gothic novelist Mary Shelley drowned on July 8, 1822, after his boat was caught in a sudden storm on the Gulf of Spezia.

Shelley’s life and death were consequently memorialised by sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, who depicts his body nude and washed up on the shore. While the white marble statue has been housed ever since at University College, Oxford, it has ever been linked in art history to the Italian gravesite; the physical rendering of Shelley’s death merges with the power of Shakespeare’s words.

It is this interplay between word and image which has long fascinated Professor Hilary Fraser, executive dean of Birkbeck’s School of Arts. She recently shared her fascination at the Sally Ledger Memorial lecture (this year a major component of the Arts and Feeling Conference), held at Birkbeck’s Clore lecture theatre which brimmed with colleagues and peers from the arts and academia.

Her lecture, ‘The Language of Mourning in Fin-de-Siècle Sculpture’ explored the aesthetic response to art, and how writers and critics conceptualise the emotional aspects of it. A stimulating, and at times very poignant presentation, it seemed an appropriate topic for exploration, given the fact the biennial lecture marks the loss – and celebrates the life – of Professor Sally Ledger, a leading scholar of 19^th century literature at Birkbeck and Royal Holloway who died in 2009.

Bridging the gap between public and private experience

Les Bourgeois de Calais (1889), Auguste Rodin. (Pic credit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Arpingstone)

To frame her presentation, Prof Fraser shared her experience of attending the 2006 Royal Academy exhibition of French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s work. At the time experiencing bereavement in her own life, Prof Fraser had a powerful response to the series of mournful sculptures on display – most notably Les Bourgeois de Calais (1889).

“It was a tremendous exhibition, but I had to walk out,” Prof Fraser explained.

“It made my heart swell too much for me to remain comfortably. Why? Because it spoke to me about my own grief.”

This experience affirmed her research interest in how public monuments can bring forth a private response, and how this sentiment is reflected in critical and poetic responses to sculpture.

During the course of her lecture, Prof Fraser drew on many examples to illustrate this strand of her research, firstly on the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke – once Rodin’s private secretary – who also noted the ability of art to bridge the gap between public and private experience.

Other examples included:

Roland Barthes’s thoughts on photography and its link between the “then” and the “now”, much like in sculpture
Frank Rinder’s writing on Edward Onslow Ford’s Snowdrift – a sculpture of a dead, or perhaps merely sleeping, female figure which is noted for its haunting realism, serving to strengthen the viewer’s emotional response
British aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (the pen name of Violet Paget), who wrote about the ability of art to invoke “the human realities” of what they represent
Andrea Carlo Lucchesi’s memorial to Edward Onslow Ford, which stands in London’s Abbey Road; its mournful female figure (a reference to Onslow Ford’s Muse of Poetry) who is seated, not playing her lyre. This direct sculptural reference to Onslow Ford’s comparatively joyful figure in turn evoked within Prof Fraser’s mind such writing as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, and Frederic Leighton’s The Great God Pan

“We respond with our hearts”

In conclusion, Prof Fraser reiterated that, in carrying out her research into The Language of Mourning in Fin-de-Siècle Sculpture, she hopes to affirm the importance of feeling ‘then’ and ‘now’, both in the experience of the arts and in the academic community.

Powerful sculptures like the Shelley Memorial, she said, “break down the distinctions between public and private grief”. And as has been recurrently reflected upon by writers and critics through the centuries, the affective experience of viewing a public piece of work is so often defined by the private experience we bring to it.

“We respond with our bodies, with our hearts and tears perhaps, across space and time,” Prof Fraser concluded.

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Artist’s Impression: Mangled Metal

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This post was contributed by John Timberlake, the Peltz Gallery’s artist-in-residence – a position which, in its inaugural year, has been carried out in collaboration with Bow Arts.

John and Dr Gabriel Koureas, senior lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, have joined forces to devise an exhibition now on at the Peltz (Artist’s Impression: Mangled Metal), which reflects on the use of mangled metal as an exhibitionary strategy by museums of war in representations of Britain’s ‘small wars’ from 1945 to the present day, and the War on Terror.

Here, John outlines the genesis of the exhibition.

Artist’s Impression: Mangled Metal (cardboard,glue and acrylic paint, 30 x 2.5 x 2.7 cm.)

‘Artist’s Impression: Mangled Metal’ takes its title from respective concerns of both Gabriel Koureas’ academic research on the representation of the ‘terrorist’ in museological debates (see Gabriel’s essay ‘Competing Masculinities in the Museum Space: Terrorists, Machines and Mangled Metal’) and my own long standing interest in ‘artist’s impressions’, collages, fabrication, and the representation of history in art.

At the time we started our conversation in April of this year, the anniversary of the 7/7 bombings was not something Gabriel or I had particularly thought of. However, our thoughts had been concerned with thinking about visual representation of the traces of violent conflict in museum contexts, and we were interested in having a conversation about that. Since 1945, Britain has been involved in a series of so-called ‘small wars’ that have at times seemed invisible.

In particular, the project reflects interests Gabriel and I realized we shared – around uses and readings of the photographic archive and mediation of trauma and cultural memory, in terms of both the efficacies and inadequacies of such mediations.

Fabricator of devotional ‘relics’

AI MM fragment (cardboard,glue and paint, 45 x 47 x 23 cm)

We set about looking at the evidential documentation in the photographic archives in the Imperial War Museum, and I started making approximations of what I saw. In this context, my role as artist carries echoes of a fabricator of devotional ‘relics’ – perhaps analogous to that of the maker of religious icons or devotional objects, who constructs fake relics in order to help others believe.

Terrorism, like all militarisms, ultimately seems to believe in the possibility of violent gesture as historical tool agency or motive force. However, terrorism seems to particularly relish its role in the staging of horror, and might be thought of as the point at which (para)military violence most closely approaches the point of a sort of obscene theatre.

There is a strange convergence to be made here – perhaps distasteful, perhaps a category error, but perhaps also necessary, as ‘war art’ itself might be: ‘Theatricality’ was held by Modernists to be the point at which art became less than it could be a point of degeneration – hence the criticisms of emergent Minimalism in the 1960s and 1970s by the defenders and supporters of Clement Greenberg, then and since. For that reason if no other, an installation which referenced the Minimalist scatter piece, in which no single element dominated, and no particular resolved form of craft or artistic judgment was elevated above others, seemed to me an appropriate form of installation as the work developed.

Paul Nash,The Battle of Germany

Bomb fragment drawing

Beyond the role of fabricator I have described above, my role as an artist in a project like this might also be seen as that of an interpreter of dubious reliability: making three dimensional objects from photographs which show them only from one angle inevitably leads to misjudgments about scale, size, and perspective – all of which are ripe in their potential as metaphors for reading history generally.

This work represents an engagement with sculpture of course, but like my We Are History installation at Beaconsfield in Vauxhall last year, it is also a work of painting – a ‘landscape’ of ‘abstracted forms’ which carries with it echoes of particular pre-occupations of English Modernism. So in that sense, I also found other preoccupations re-surfacing in the work as I made it. Prior to beginning the conversations with Gabriel I had been thinking a lot about Paul Nash’s great painting The Battle of Germany (1944) which is currently hanging adjacent to my own large landscape, Another Country XV in the Imperial War Museum in Kennington in the exhibition Visions of War From Above and Below.

When it first emerged, Nash’s painting reportedly left patrons and supporters bewildered. Looking at the painting now with the hindsight of seventy-one years, it proves the doubters wrong and seems absolutely right for its time – overdeterminedly so, in fact, so that it remains an uneasy painting. I always feel that having experienced war first hand a generation earlier, Nash must have been aware that working from photographs for this later work placed him in a position of ‘flying blind’.

Seemingly teetering on the brink of post war Pax Americana abstraction, the canvas presents the final stages of the Allied bombing onslaught on Germany as only half discernable in conventional landscape terms, as an airborne vista. Nash’s work creates a momentary strained cohesion of figurative elements, brushwork motifs, elisions and shifts that seem to emerge and retreat amongst abstract gesture: for example, there is a distant moon-lit horizon of the kind one might imagine seeing from an aircraft at altititude, extending midway from the left edge of the picture, but by the middle of the canvas its authority as a point of register for the viewer is supplanted by other horizontals, suggesting different planes of focus, or perhaps the pitching diving and banking of attacking and defending aircraft in a dogfight over a target zone, but also reflecting personal painterly pre-occupations of the artist evidenced in earlier, pre-war work.

The effect is one of a field of elements in flux. Hito Steyerl has written of how the blurred tilting horizons reflections and displacements of J.M.W.Turner’s Slave Ship Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840) reflect the moment when the very idea of a ‘calculable and predictable future shows a murderous side through an insurance that prevents economic loss by inspiring cold blooded murder’.

At this point, Steyerl writes, ‘Space dissolves into mayhem on the unstable and treacherous surface of an unpredictable sea.’ (The Wretched of the Screen, pp21-22) Something similar might be ascribed to The Battle of Germany, painted at that point where the intensity and immensity of total war piles statistics upon ever more statistics, and extant terms of reference in terms of both moral choices are challenged or overthrown.

Nash’s collaging of different painterly passages, figures and abstractions seems to tentatively suggest uneasy equivalences, of which he himself does not seem to be sure: a rising cloud of unearthly spheres (a figure found in works of the interwar years such as Voyages of the Moon, 1934-37).

An ‘artist’s impression’

In some way or other, then, all these concerns found their way into the piece now on display in the Peltz Gallery: one might be tempted to be deliberately obtuse and claim it to be exactly that ‘landscape of abstracted forms’ that has been the pre-occupation of a certain kind of Home Counties English Modernism for the past century.

But I also hope that, given its subject matter, lowly materiality (it is just cardboard, paint and glue after all) it evidences an inversion of that, and embraces a more tentative and less self confidently resolved mode of making art, one attuned to flux and provisionality: an ‘artist’s impression’ that admits its fallibilities and misreadings.

Artist’s Impression: Mangled Metal, runs at the Peltz Gallery, 43 Gordon Square, from Saturday, July 4 to Friday, August 14. Opening times are Mondays to Fridays, 10am-8pm, and Saturdays, 10am-5pm

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Birkbeck Events Blog

Reflections by Birkbeck experts and students on a wide range of events held throughout the year.

Tag Archives: School of Arts