TATE
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.
Lines of Sight: Alfred Watkins, photography and topography in early twentieth century Britain Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) originated the idea of ley-lines and surveyed alignments which articulated the prehistoric landscape of Britain, in his native Herefordshire in the 1920s. Despite the scepticism of academic archaeologists, his vision of ley-lines helped shape popular views of British landscape in the interwar years, and, during a revival of Watkins’s work from 1969, practices and perceptions of British land art.
This paper examines some the changes that digital technology has wrought upon conceptions of space, time and culture, and how ‘new media art’ has historically reflected upon these. It suggests that such art might be better represented in institutions such as Tate, which in turn might help them engage with the question of what their own role might be in the digital age.
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?
This paper focuses on practices that captured critical and curatorial attention in Scotland and England at the turn of this century: relational aesthetics and the new formalism. Critical and curatorial representations of these practices have tended to present each as novel and as dichotomous. I argue that dominant representations of each tendency are mypopic and parochial, and ignore vernacular mobilisation in favour of hegemonic imaginaries such as ‘Britishness’ and the ‘new internationalism’. Paying closer ethnographic attention to the differentiated glocal communities in which such art was produced and consumed offers an alternative, culturally invested reading.
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.
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.