Wednesday 5 March 2008, 10.00–16.00

Tate Liverpool  The Auditorium
Free, no booking necessary

10.00  Registration and Reception

10.20  Introduction: Professor Colin Fallows

10.30  Chair: Dinesh Allirajah

Presentations

10.35   Rebecca Key

10.00   John O’Hare

11.25   Break

11.40   Moira Kenny

11.05   James Kent

12.30   Question and Answer Session

Chair: Dinesh Allirajah

13.00     BUFFET LUNCH

Presentations

14.15     Sharon Watts

14.40     Kay Carson

15.05     Alice Roberts

15.30     Question and Answer Session

Chair: Dinesh Allirajah

16.00     CLOSE

Introduction

Seven postgraduate researchers from Liverpool John Moores University are adding their diverse artistic voices to the capital of culture. Taking Positions, this year’s Liverpool School of Art and Design Masters in Research (M.Res.) symposium is held at Tate Liverpool on Wednesday 5 March. The university’s postgraduate research students will talk on subjects ranging from the studio aesthetic, sound curation, decayed spaces, and sonic art, through to the work of collagist John Heartfield, text art and forecasting fashion design trends. Liverpool-based writer and jazz poet Dinesh Allirajah will chair the event, which runs from 10am–4.00pm and includes question and answer sessions. 

Taking Positions refers to the work of this M.Res. group placing themselves within the wider art and design research continuum. The papers presented reflect both the diversity of subject and background of each speaker, including Curatorial Practice, Sonic Arts and Art and Design History. The symposium marks the mid-point of each researcher establishing academic ownership, deciding where their research sits in the academic community, with a view to developing further focused investigation. These investigations mark a series of contributions to specialist fields,as the group develop and continue to expand the significance of their dialogue.

Rebecca Key

Rebecca Key MFA, BA(Hons) lives and works in the North West, and is currently undertaking practice-based research.

‘Key creates installations that examine social space. She has previously created an arts administrator’s office in

a gallery space, a creative inversion that ought to have been too near the knuckle for many.’ a-n Magazine.

She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and also works as an art director in the film and television industry.

The Studio Aesthetic

In contemporary discourse, accounts of artists’ studios are primarily focused on: ‘I am an artist,

I am in my studio’, or on the product – the artwork itself. Reasons how and why the studio looks the way it does are often overlooked. The studio is not a private place – it is where associations and assumptions are made by the viewer. The artist’s studio, like a stage set, is dressed for an audience. The dressing of this space, contributes to the background narrative to the artist’s life and work, the artists own mythology. This paper looks at examples of reconstructed artists’ studios and historical aspects of the studio that form Key’s philosophical relationship with, and subsequent renouncement of, the studio.

John O'Hare

Since graduation from his BA in Fine Art (2005) John O’Hare has been involved in art projects that require a response that is particular to location. This has included shows in various Art Organisation (TAO) acquired spaces, Open Spaces Open Places (Northampton), and organising exhibitions with Wolstenholme Projects (Liverpool). O’Hare is interested in decayed spaces and their ensuing transformation process. He is currently a researcher for Final Intervention, which is an initiative that brings installation artists together in response to buildings shortly to be demolished in London’s East End as it prepares for the 2012 Olympics.

In his practice-led research he is exploring traces of time in objects and places, employing colour to evoke the play amongst these whilst considering the contribution this response makes to an overall story of the space.

The Decayed Building as Forum for Creative Engagement

Considering the house when it is no longer a home, this paper is an assessment of attempts to visualise and engage with the traces of decay upon the present experience. The paper will consider why decay engages the imagination. Discussing the idea that absence becomes present by its traces left in the decayed space this paper presents a visual engagement with the themes of palimpsest and anachronism. Decay has the ability to make the familiar strange, and in the case of former living spaces that are not of cultural or historic significance, it renders them open to O’Hare’s interventions. An intimacy with the ruins that characterises O’Hare’s work in which the dilapidated building becomes an arena for thought.

Moira Kenny

Moira Kenny records rituals and tradition in an effort to determine her own identity. Born into an Irish family, from an early age she was aware of segregation caused by religion and the media. By recording the challenges of conflict and strength using both human and architectural samples, the content of the disclosures reveal the mundane and ordinary to the shocking and disturbing. Her practice crosses over from the arts to the public domain, from the physical to the ephemeral, from the visual to the audible producing a necessary oscillation. A collector of words and sounds, a receiver of the un-wanted, left-over’s and in-betweens. Kenny records life as an artist using the format of a public diary leaving herself open to criticism by creating a body of material including references to sources of inspiration and routine activities. Publishing records that later have to be deleted or saved to draft to avoid litigation. Currently working as a consultant for the Museum of Liverpool developing an exhibition for 2010, paradoxically she is personally challenged by time versus deep engagement when viewing work within a gallery setting.

Audio Not Death Row

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge and understanding of exhibiting sound art by questioning the current working methods of curatorial practice and the wider gallery system, finding connections in a comparable virtual world.

Case studies of good, bad and future practice developing an investigation of methodologies, problems and compromise will create a statement and analysis of particular problems that have occurred in real situations kick-starting a solution strategy network.

Sound art has no place in the traditional museum which provides entertainment for the general public without due consideration to time and audio properties. Sound art is for the connoisseur not the dilettante. The argument for the aesthetic and cultural isolation of audio will establish the need for a pilot project determining a purpose built space to enable sound art to be accepted as a genre in its own right. The computer network of sound artists bears the notion of the new underground. Is it possible in 2008 to have an underground or is it a phenomenon of the past?

James Kent

James Kent listens out for everyday occurrences that we accept willingly. He has been fascinated with sound for the past seven years and is currently researching in the field of sonic arts with a key interest at this juncture in immersive sound.

Sound Received

Sound is vibrational mechanical energy that propagates through matter as a wave. It can be characterised by its wavelength, amplitude, and frequency to name a few. James Kent will demonstrate the position of his work in the context of contemporary research in sonic arts. This paper aims to explore the notion of ‘immersive’ sound that exists throughout the world of sonic arts.

Sharon Watts

A native of Liverpool, Sharon moved to Manhattan on completion of her degree in Fashion and Textiles at the Liverpool Polytechnic in 1989 in search of a career in the fashion industry. Six months turned into ten years and her first job as a textile designer on Seventh Avenue led to her becoming the Art Director of a Design Studio there, primarily working with the high end fashion companies Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. On returning to the UK Sharon’s knowledge and expertise has been sought after across the country in higher education, teaching at a broad spectrum of Art Schools and Universities in such areas as Fashion Marketing, Textile Design, Print and Illustration. Currently Course Leader for Design and Applied Arts at the University of Wolverhampton, Sharon is now questioning and challenging her previous milieu and asking the industry to rethink its approach  to design, adopting a more ethical conscience and a return to innovation by abandoning established Trend Forecasting Services and taking charge of design once more.

Trend Forecasting Overload

Are we, fashion and textile designers, becoming puppets of the multi-billion dollar industry called Trend Forecasting? Is the need to be ‘on trend’ stifling creativity as designers are constantly bombarded with information and a need to satisfy an increasingly informed market? Or are designers returning to maverick thinking, having reached a tipping point, and looking longer term and at deeper issues to inform their design decisions? This paper will reassess the importance of established trend forecasting companies as a truly creative catalyst and will examine the more conceptual approach of longer-term futurology as a more responsible and innovative means to look at fashion and textile design for the twenty-first century.

Kay Carson

Kay Carson’s chief fascination has always been words, since learning to read at the age of two. For the past twenty years, she has been based in the North West of England as a writer, journalist, page layout designer and (more recently) art reviewer for national and regional newspapers, magazines and websites, winning an arts writing award in 2006 for her article on the Bruce Nauman retrospective, Make Me Think Me, at Tate Liverpool and two newspaper awards

in 2007 for her quirky, eye-catching headlines. Carson is passionate about modern and contemporary art and it comes as no surprise that her research explores the use of text by artists. She examines the wordplay and word power of artists: their ability to not only grab the viewer’s attention but to direct it, creating messages that are ironic, sardonic, subversive, instructive, provocative, emotive and political.

The World's Your Oyster: Aphorisms in Contemporary Art

We live in a fast-paced world of Internet access, digital cameras and microwave meals. Everything must be labour-saving and instantly gratifying. Communication strives to be readable and digestible within a second or two, as that is all the time there is to capture someone’s fleeting attention. In our soundbite and slogan age, the aphorism is undergoing a renaissance. This short, succinct, turn of phrase, amusing yet usually imparting a grain  of truth, was once the province of literary wits and philosophical sages, but is now a rising phenomenon in postmodern art. By analysing the work of text artists from Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Bruce Nauman to Deborah Kass and Mark Titchner, this paper will explore the reasons why the aphorism has made its way into art; how sayings have taken visual form and are now regarded as legitimate works of art; and, importantly, the way in which artists are using aphoristic licence through humour and / or wordplay to send out deeper subtexts which, though quick to read, linger in the memory.

Alice Roberts

Alice Roberts has made a backwards slide in time, from Surrealism to Dada. She has always been interested in dynamic, short-lived art movements which flourished in the inter-war/wartime eras.  The focus of her research has shifted from the inner to outer worlds. The inner realm is represented by her Manchester University BA dissertation on Max Ernst’s collage novel, La femme 100 têtes. She explored the Surrealist preoccupations of psychoanalysis, dreams and the occult (the mind’s inner sanctum). Her present research project at Liverpool John Moores University has expanded outwards to encompass the work of John Heartfield in the context of wider Weimar art and society, in relation to Russian agitprop. Roberts works at Tate Liverpool, giving talks to visitors about the collection, as well as creating accessories and jewellery. This collage of interests feeds into her research. In the future Roberts intends to take her research to PhD level, focussing either on John Heartfield or his Berlin Dada co-conspirator, Hannah Höch.

The Persistence of Dada: Humour and Satire in the Photomontages of John Heartfield

In this paper Alice Roberts will examine how John Heartfield distilled the irreverent Dada spirit into his powerful photomontages of later years. Tracing his development from the Dada years, she will identify the forces which shaped his photomontages. The Berlin Dadaists exhibited a sculpture of a pig headed German World War I officer at the 1920 International Dada Fair. Fifteen years later, in his photomontage, Hurrah, Die Butter Ist Alle (1935) he turned the words of Goering against him in an attack on the Nazi drive for economic self sufficiency at a time of privation for many Germans. This can be compared to the suffering in the name of ideology of the Chinese people during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Alice Roberts will argue that without the politically charged antics of the Berlin Dadaists, Heartfield’s later work would not be possible. It was during this time that Heartfield experimented with montage techniques and radical typography. In his photomontages, text is as important as the image. Bleak humour is often used to counterbalance the grave seriousness of the image. The final aim is to determine how the urgency of the message is increased or decreased through the use of such gallows humour. Roberts will also argue that often, in his most didactic Communist images, the very lack of humour adversely affects the primacy of the message. She will achieve this through close scrutiny of his most powerful works.