Annual Postgraduate Symposium: Research in Progress 2016

A series of short papers (c.15 min, plus some time for discussion) by postgraduate research students from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

A series of short papers (c.15 min, plus some time for discussion) by postgraduate research students from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies who are progressing from the first to second year.

10.00
Welcome from Postgraduate Research Tutor Professor David Jackson and Director of Research, Professor Griselda Pollock.

10.15-11.30
Chair: Professor David Jackson

Heather Findling: Investigations concerning the authorship on Egon Schiele in postwar Vienna, Austria
This paper will explore the notion of authorship and memory in the reinterpretation of modern artist Egon Schiele during the immediate post-war years (1945-1950) in Vienna, Austria. It will discuss the meaning of the artist through particular art exhibitions that featured his artwork, as well as through the perspective of art professionals active in Vienna who reinvented Schiele textually. It is hoped that this examination will bring to the surface tensions of recall between select sources and the Austrian nation, and how both have deliberately authored the artist to suit specific intentions

Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth: Sèvres-mania’: Collecting a Brand
My thesis looks to explore the collecting of pre-revolutionary French Sèvres porcelain in Britain during the nineteenth century, which were dispersed into new systems of circulation due to the shifting socio-political fabric of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. This paper will examine the notion of ‘Sèvres-mania’, which from the 1840s was encouraged by unprecedented prices and a competitive fervour within the auction house. Notably in 1874 the antique dealer Edward Rutter paid an incredible £10,500 for three vases on behalf of the Earl of Dudley. Using Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘brand’ as its historical lens, this thesis will investigate pre-revolutionary Sèvres porcelain as its own type of ‘brand’, operating within a sign system, which developed particular historical meaning and value throughout the nineteenth-century in Britain.

Julia Ankenbrand: Museum engagement through a systems lens
Participation, co-curation, shifting power – current museum practice is actively asking questions about re-configuring social, cultural, and political contexts of museums and cultural participation. In this context, the British Museum is running a three year project exploring the capabilities and characteristics of collaborating and partnering with ‘communities’ – aiming at the question of how to embed this practice in its organisational fabric. My PhD project assists this process by deconstructing it. Systems thinking and systemic action research are used to start at the source. This presentation is about how I am facilitating action learning in the British Museum to unearth the complexity and dependencies in the museum sector’s quest for meaning through participation.

11.30 – 12.00
Break

12.00- 13.00
Chair: Professor Griselda Pollock

Alaena Turner: Artist as host and guest: An analysis of hospitality in relation to curatorial practice
The talk will present documentation of an exhibition I have produced as artist-curator, ‘Ingredients, Method, Serving Suggestion’, A.P.T. Gallery, London (July-Sep 2016), for which I was awarded the A.P.T. Curatorial Fellowship 2016. The paper will utilise my research into hospitality, making reference to key texts by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere, and Maria Lind, to explore the extent to which working as an artist-curator may propose new forms of collaboration or alternate strategies of display.

David Steans: Real-menacing
Taking a cue from broadly postmodern approaches to narrative and storytelling in contemporary art, literature and moving image media, my practice-led research looks at – and will employ – the blurring of fact and fiction as creative and critical method. My approach is interdisciplinary, and underpinned by the concept of genre (as theorized by John Frow) and the notion of art that ‘returns to the scene’. Central references include meta- or inter-textual horror, the mockumentary, the artist’s novel and fan fiction. In this paper I will attempt to elaborate upon and develop Cynthia Freeland’s definition of ‘realist horror’, demonstrating its continuing relevance and applicability. I will do so by examining a selection of recent works that have employed reflexivity and meta- or inter-textuality to affective, disruptive and subversive ends.

13.00-14.00
Lunch (Room G.04)

Location details

Student Common Room
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
University Road