School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemSeeing art by people with experience of mental illness and/or psychological trauma: a multi-dimensional framework(The Cunningham Dax Collection, 2008)Mental illness is a subject clouded by misunderstanding and prejudice. Creative works by people with an experience of mental illness and/or psychological trauma are often similarly misunderstood. There is a tendency for such works to be viewed from one standpoint only, thereby denying their multi-faceted nature. The exhibition, The Art of Making Sense, has been developed to resolve one of these difficulties. Several years of research undertaken independently by the Cunningham Dax Collection, and more recently in partnership with several partner institutions, have led to the development of a “multi-dimensional” framework for exhibiting, viewing and understanding the art of people with mental illness and/or psychological trauma. The central idea behind the multi-dimensional framework is that creative work by people with experience of mental illness and/or psychological trauma cannot be understood through one perspective. As this exhibition proposes, such work can be viewed through several different interpretive frameworks including, but not limited to, the personal, the medical, the ethical, the historical, and the creative.
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ItemIan Friend: cryptic architecture(Andrew Baker Art Dealer, 2008)It is often assumed that structure is the antithesis of chaos, that architecture must define itself against nature’s randomness. But things are not that simple. The Italian Rationalist architects of the 1930s, for example, argued that a mathematical equation known as the Golden Section was visible in nature. The fact that the structure of nautilus shells adhered to this formula was read as evidence that order pervaded the natural world. Similarly, chaos theory has told us that what seems like disorganized activity in nature conforms to patterns that have shape and form.
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ItemArt and mental illness: an art historical perspective(Neami Splash Art, 2007)Mental illness has for centuries been closely associated in the popular imagination with exceptional creativity and great works of art. I will argue today that it is important not to be complacent about this association, as it has led to some grave misconceptions about the nature of mental illness. The persistence of such misconceptions in the media demonstrates that there is a pressing need for ongoing analysis and debate about appropriate and ethical ways in which to discuss, exhibit and interpret the art work of people who experience mental illness. Coming from an art historical perspective, I hope to suggest ways to make progress in this debate. For the purpose of today’s talk, in speaking of ‘art,’ I will be referring not only to those works judged to provide evidence of exceptional creativity but rather any created visual product in any medium. Mental illness will be defined as clinically significant, psychological syndromes associated with distress, disability or loss of freedom.
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ItemThe ice-age(Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2007)Lee Bul’s Mon grand récit: because everything … 2005 is a table-top miniature world. One of a pair of major sculptures sharing the same title and mapping the same mysterious topography, the Govett-Brewster’s Mon grand récit: because everything’s alter ego, Mon grand récit: weep into stones… 2005 was shown at the Basel Art Fair in 2005. The two works are very similar, though the Govett-Brewster version is slightly larger and is dominated by a glossy, sprawling, white base resembling a vast glacier, whereas the same forms in Weep into stones… are suspended in space, like a huge train-set on scaffolding. Both works are composed of images of the wreckage of modern history’s mass utopias, of the twentieth century visions of crazy perfection that were shared by capitalism, fascism and communism. These visions have now disintegrated. First, this essay looks at Mon grand récit: because everything… as a work of art that represents the duration of modern history and its entropic end. It does this by translating duration into metonymic images, into images that represent the twentieth century’s failed utopias by architectural models of never-completed modernist monuments in construction: a hanging, bent wood freeway hovering above a snowy abyss; a mountainous central tower encrusted with miniature crystal models; a tiny scale model of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-constructed Monument to the Third International 1920 perched on a glacial waste. Second, the essay shows that because Lee Bul presents modern history as both personal and shared, the instructional diorama represents her quite strategic and very conscious argument against contemporary art criticism’s hermeneutics of nationality, in favour of a determinedly global perspective.
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ItemSusan Norrie( 2004)The work of Susan Norrie, which now spans more than two decades, is challenging, provocative and inspirational. As with all visionary artists, Norrie’s practice has developed and changed over time, now incorporating painting, objects, still and moving images and sound. from her paintings to her installations and video projections, Norrie’s work combines technical brilliance and extraordinary talent with an acute and restless intelligence.
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ItemLa tentation néoclassique: les plafonds peints romains de Panini à Mengs(Musee Fesch, 2002)The following is the original English text of: Marshall, David R., ‘La tentation néoclassique: les plafonds peints romains de Panini à Mengs’, in Jean-Marc Olivesi (ed.), ‘Les Cieux en Gloire’. Bozzetti et modelli pour les eglises et les palais de la Rome Baroque, Musee Fesch, 2002, pp. 377-386. In 1711 Giovanni Paolo Panini arrived in Rome from Piacenza; fifty years later in 1761 Anton Raphael Mengs left Rome for Madrid. The former, better known as a painter of architectural capricci and vedute, was the heir to the Bolognese Baroque tradition of quadratura, or illusionistic architectural painting; the latter at the Galleria Albani rejected Baroque illusionism for the strict quadro riportato, or fictive framed easel painting, and so produced the first Neoclassical ceiling. Their paths seem hardly to have crossed, yet both worked for Cardinal Alessandro Albani, and both had to accommodate themselves to the mainstream of Roman ceiling painting, the illusionistic tradition stemming from Pietro da Cortona and reformulated in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in terms of an opposition between Carlo Maratta and G.B. Gaulli, Il Baciccio. Common to the masterpieces of these artists—the ceiling of the Salone of the Palazzo Altieri and the vault of the Gesù—is the ceiling cartouche, or rectangular field with semicircular ends, a framing motif that played so conspicuous a part in subsequent Roman ceilings that the history of the eighteenth-century Roman ceiling can be written in terms of the history of the relationship between the cartouche and the rest of the ceiling.