TATE
In the early 1990s Nancy Spero (born 1926) composed a series of homages to the Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985). These works recreated a performance by Mendieta which Spero had witnessed in 1982. Using this encounter as a lens, the article examines how these two artists share a feminist strategy of self-representation.
This paper was presented by members of Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden) at Tate Modern in March 2003 as part of the talks series Painting Present. It argues that painting resists the Institutional Theory of art in as much as it does not depend on institutions for its status as art. In this respect, painting after conceptual art may be seen as just as critical of art institutions as conceptual art used to be.
Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark And Le Corbusier Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78), who trained originally as an architect, is best known for his spectacular ‘building cuts’. These have often been seen as an outright rejection of the architectural profession. The collaborative project Anarchitecture (1974), however, demonstrates how the language of modernism, particularly the polemical and epigrammatic Towards a New Architecture by the French modernist artist and architect Le Corbusier, was very much part of his raw material.
detail from: Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit, 1970 (photographed on acquisition, 1981) Joseph Beuys' use of unconventional materials, such as felt, wax, and fat, characterise his artworks. Whilst museums strive to obtain artists' instructions regarding their objects' life-span and care, Beuys' preferences were largely unrecorded or inconsistent. The three case studies of Beuys works presented here explore museum decision-making when confronted with unclear artist attitudes to conservation intervention, and objects evincing material and conceptual decay.
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (born 1958) addresses the themes of loss and bereavement in her sculpture Unland: audible in the mouth, 1998. Focusing on this work in Tate's collection, the paper looks at the position of witnesses to violent events and how their testimonies are translated by Salcedo into the formal language of sculpture.
The rediscovery of the Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–86) as an artist in the cinema allows us to see his films anew as vital participants in the contemporary art world. Citing references to the filmmaker’s long-take aesthetic in contemporary art, this paper argues that Tarkovsky’s concepts of the imprinted image and of time in cinema are particularly significant today for video artists who investigate media as the material texture of modernity.
In 1986 Victor Burgin made a series of photographic works based on Edward Hopper's painting Office at Night (1940) featuring a female secretary and male boss. In this paper, which is based on a talk given at Tate Modern in 2004 at the time of a major Hopper exhibition, Burgin described the relationship of his own works to Hopper's painting, exploring the sexual codes implicit in both.
This paper discusses the relation between trauma and representation in the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar (born 1956), focusing mainly on his installations dedicated to Africa, in particular Sudan and Rwanda. It will be argued that the artist toys with the mechanisms of trauma, reprogramming the shock dynamics of trauma and substituting the aesthetics of the wound with the ‘document’, which contextualises and integrates image and event beyond and against the politics of global information.
A close inspection of Richard Serra's sculptural oeuvre, based on consultation with the artist himself, reveals that issues relating to replicas and reproductions have relatively little applicability for his practice. While Serra's sculpture has ranged widely in form over the past forty years, it can nonetheless be loosely subdivided into four principal groupings, each determined by the materials employed.
Constable (1776–1837) made one of his characteristic 'six footer' oil sketches in preparation for Hadleigh Castle which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1829. The sketch has strips of canvas added at left and lower edges, the attribution of which has long been a subject of debate. A fresh technical study re-examines the evidence surrounding these compositional alterations.
The work of Emila Medková (1928–1985) is a remarkable example of surrealist documentary photography. A central member of the post-war Czech surrealist group, her images focus on the 'concrete irrationality' of the urban environment, finding metaphors in the world of objects and spaces for the absurd and oppressive state of post-war central Europe.
This paper discusses the painting of the courtier and writer Sir William Killigrew and the companion portrait of his wife Mary Hill, Lady Killigrew, both painted in 1638, by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). The pair were acquired by Tate in 2002 and 2003 from two entirely different sources.
In the late 1960s, a number of artists who had trained as sculptors, and whose most well known work was sculpture, started working with film (Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson). Around the same time, independent film makers who did not necessarily identify themselves as ‘artists’ began to consider the sculptural dimensions of film – paying attention not just to the images that they presented on the screen...
Pataphysical Graham ‘Pataphysical Graham’ investigates the possible use of pataphysical motifs in the work of the contemporary Canadian artist Rodney Graham, through his recourse to the figures of the clinamen and the spiral, two key motifs in ’pataphysics. The discussion is keyed to issues of melancholy and utopia, as these recur in Graham’s work.
E. A. Hornel, The Dance of Spring 1891 Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove E. A. Hornel (1864–1933) depicted Galloway girls in decorative, idyllic natural settings. From 1900 he also designed a small Japanese garden at Broughton House in the Borders town of Kirkcudbright. Hornel's garden combines standard features of Japonaiserie with a few symbols of ‘Scottishness’ - local stones and relics. So how might we interpret references to idealised Japanese and Scottish aesthetic and cultural traditions in both paintings and garden?
Cy Twombly’s remark that ‘lines have a great effect on painting’ resonates not only with his graphic practice but with his relation to poetry. The importance of the modern German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to Twombly includes the figure of the Orphic poet and their shared interest in the ancient River Nile. Twombly’s Egyptian series, Coronation of Sesostris, 2000, represents a late flowering of his remarkable graphic inventiveness.
The essay traces military relationships in the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), paying particular attention to his notes of 1912 known as the 'Jura-Paris Road'. These are interpreted as 'military texts' and the author shows how military concerns remained with Duchamp throughout his career, resulting in facetious outcomes that obscured uneasy preoccupations.
Sickert's interest in popular entertainment extended beyond the London music-hall and his 1915 painting Brighton Pierrots depicts a troupe of vaudeville performers on the beach at Brighton. This paper explores the social-historical context of seaside Pierrot groups in England and the related European traditions of the Commedia dell'Arte and French pantomime.
This paper discusses a hitherto unpublished drawing by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) that relates to his masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. This drawing escaped the attention of Duchamp scholars because the artist gave it as a present to an American television producer in 1956. The significance of the note, together with the circumstances of the gift, is discussed here.
The American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–72) is famous for his allusive box constructions. This paper examines the history of Planet Set, 1950, a work in Tate's Collection that has received little critical commentary. In particular, it explores Cornell's fascination with the early nineteenth-century opera singer Giuditta Pasta, and shows how this relates to a number of other themes in his work, including stars, maps and birds.
Hans Hartung (1904–89) suffered a major stroke in 1986 and was wheelchair-bound for his remaining years. Yet in theis period he produced an astonishing number of large and energetically painted canvases. Some people speculated that the paintings must have been produced by his team of studio assistants. This paper examines the relationship of Hartung and his assistants in his last years in order to explore the role played by the artist as author of his late works.
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the most inventive artists of his age, exploring the strange and fantastic in a way that anticipates modern horror. By focusing on a pageant held in his honour, this essay interprets Fuseli's work in relation to the wider culture of the Gothic and the historical trauma of the American Revolution.
This paper presents an extended close reading of Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python), 1954, particularly as it relates to his later sculptural work and engages the terms fetish object, modernist sculpture, monument and poetics. Twombly’s constructions are found less to defy description and categorisation than to position themselves productively in between such discourses.
In the United States postmodern scepticism often has relegated Cy Twombly’s engagement with classical and humanist themes to nostalgia, irrelevance or an over-indulgence in European tropes. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, two of the most active polemicists of the period, Robert Motherwell and Charles Olson, the leader of the Black Mountain poets, saw Twombly’s early works as compatible with their own ideologies and artistic strategies. This paper argues that Twombly learned from his mentors and participated in an American revision of humanism that prepared a foundation for his lifelong commitment to humanist discourse.
The subject of this paper is a portrait of the celebrated eighteenth-century dancer, Auguste Vestris, acquired by Tate in 1955, when it was attributed to Gainsborough Dupont, nephew of Thomas Gainsborough. The paper argues that the portrait is in fact by Gainsborough himself and, through a discussion of the context in which it was made, sheds new light on Gainsborough's close relations with the world of the London stage.
During the 1990s Michael Landy made four major installations, including Scrapheap Services, 1995. Although motivated by personal concerns, these installations caught the mood of social change, labour market reforms and political ideology at the tail-end of the Thatcher-era in Britain. All this had a profound impact on the emerging, metropolitan art scene of the time, soon to be labelled 'young British art'.
A Dramatic Reading of Augustus Leopold Egg’s Untitled Triptych This article explores the significance of the theatrical and literary references found in the triptych Past and Present (1858) by the British nineteenth-century painter Augustus Leopold Egg. On the surface the work appears to be a warning against the perils of adultery, but analysis of the three paintings’ theatrical and literary references suggests a possible alternative reading involving a condemnation of loveless marriages.
This paper examines affinities between the Bauhaus-indebted instructional methods and practices of Josef Albers and the sculpture of Eva Hesse, his student at Yale University. The author argues that pedagogy affects artistic practice, or that the means or process through which artists are educated contributes to how they approach their work.
This paper reflects on the development of Tate Forum, Tate Britain’s peer-led youth group (established 2002), drawing on interviews with past and present group members as well as those Tate staff and artists who have worked with them. It considers to what extent they are able, not only to participate in the gallery’s programme for young audiences, but also to influence how the institution and the Collection are perceived.
Donald Judd, Untitled 1971 In his critical writing on Claes Oldenburg during the 1960s Donald Judd explained how emotional content might be conveyed through representational imagery, without the emotion depending on either the identity of the represented object or the subjective mood of the artist. Such art was neither representational, nor abstract, nor expressive in the usual understanding of these general terms. To establish the specificity of his position - through Oldenburg - Judd resorted to catachresis and syllepsis, rhetorical devices that operate where more familiar language fails.
Between text and image in Kandinsky's oeuvre: a consideration of Klange in relation to the synthesis of the arts Focusing on the album of poetry and woodcuts called Sounds (Klänge), published c.1912, this paper examines how Kandinsky understood and exploited the relationship between text and image. It shows how he conceived of the album as an example of synthetic art and explores the broader principles underlying his idea of artistic synthesis.
Jack Burnham’s systems aesthetics was one of the first, fully developed, critical theories of postformalist artistic practice. Yet Burnham, undeservedly, is little known today. Recovering, reprising and reassessing his work produces a richer reading of art production c.1970. It also suggests an alternative genealogy of contemporary practice.
The artistic representation of British antiquity brings in its wake a problem of methodology: how are the working assumptions of artists and archaeologists to be reconciled? This paper looks at two examples of artists responding to the deep past, both concerned with sites in Wiltshire. Thomas Guest (1754-1818) painted the grave goods from two barrows at Winterslow excavated in the 1810s. His paintings survived and were rediscovered in the mid-1930s. In that same decade the British artist Paul Nash encountered Avebury for the first time and responded to the prehistoric site in his own terms. The paper considers the two approaches and what they may tell us about the relationship between art and archaeology.
The following illustrated texts flag up a number of works from the last ten years, some of which are still in production, that take as their starting point existing objects or artworks and deploy processes of reproduction or replication as an investigative tool. All of these projects engage (to a greater or lesser extent) in, and have been generated through a close collaboration with, the mechanisms and culture of the museum.
Bernd and Bernd and Hilla Becher first began their project of systematically photographing industrial structures in the late 1950s. This paper, first given at a conference at Tate Modern, investigates the rhythmic continuity of the comportment or bearing toward the world that they have made into an epic form and that has gained broader influence in the work of their successful students.
The author assesses the reach of Kandinsky’s early painting, first reflecting upon the sense of scale and time in Kandinsky’s art, then his clash with the Constructivists and his emergence in New York in the 1940s as a ‘painterly’ European artist of significance. The paper finally dwells upon the nature of complexity in today’s painting, and its connections with Kandinsky across a century of change.
This paper examines Marcel Duchamp's use of the collotype printing process for publishing the contents of his Green Box and Boîte-en-valise in the 1930s. It subsequently traces the linguistic and graphic interpretations of this work by the British artist Richard Hamilton in his 1960 The Green Book and in his recent fusion of this work with the 'topography' of the Large Glass in the print Typo/Topography, published in 2003.
This paper concentrates on the making and meaning of Kenneth Armitage Pandarus (version 8) 1963, which was recently presented to Tate in 2003 by the Patrons of British Art. Special attention is given to the humanist content of Armitage’s oeuvre and how this was interpreted by critics in the 1950s and 1960s. Pandarus (version 8) is considered in the context of the cultural and social changes of the early 1960s and the rise of the New Generation sculptors. The central proposition is that despite the critical hostility that this work and others like it met, it is in fact closely attuned to the wider social concerns of the period.
In 1936 the English surrealist Eileen Agar photographed the extraordinary rock formations at Ploumanac'h in Brittany. This paper examines the ambiguous status of the photographs, using research in Tate Archives and at Ploumanac'h itself to provide new insights into Agar's images.
There is the inside and the outside.
There is the interior and exterior.
Not as in the Foucault fold, but as in
essence, force and potency:
the interior silent power of art.
And it is here that hovers
How and why I became a sculptor is not of much interest. No one looking at my work will find me in it. I have nothing to say, I have no story to tell – at least not within the means of sculpture. What happens in the studio is not all that spectacular. You have no choice when it comes to actually making the works. Everything is decided in advance. The only thing you can observe in the studio is the production of the sculpture.