Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Roundtable on Skill: Thursday 25th June, 6.30 – 8pm.
This roundtable seeks to address a number of issues concerning the controversial subject of skill in art. Some of the questions to be approached will include: what constitutes artistic skill, and how can it be demonstrated? Why have certain types of skills been prioritized and others undermined in the modern period? What logic has driven the move towards ‘de-skilling’? How might we consider the role and value of manual facility in modern and contemporary practice? Does the practice of certain kinds of skill require an abandonment of others – in what ways are different skills mutually exclusive or complementary? To arrive at satisfying answers to any of these questions would of course require a great deal of time. Here, representative voices are brought together from philosophy, art history, curatorial practice and fine art, in the hope of offering some initial responses. Each participant will offer a brief presentation; these will then be discussed between the speakers before being opened to the audience.
Participants:
Prof. Graham Parkes (Head of Philosophy, University College Cork)
Matt Packer (Curator, Lewis Glucksman Gallery)
Dobz O’Brien (Programme Manager, National Sculpture Factory)
Ed Krčma (History of Art, University College Cork)
Participants:
Prof. Graham Parkes (Head of Philosophy, University College Cork)
Matt Packer (Curator, Lewis Glucksman Gallery)
Dobz O’Brien (Programme Manager, National Sculpture Factory)
Ed Krčma (History of Art, University College Cork)
Friday, May 1, 2009
Thursday 21st May, 6.30pm River Room, Glucksman Gallery, Cork
"Synopsis of Redemption and Abjection: On the Literary History of Raphael’s Transfiguration"
Gert Hofmann, Department of German, University College Cork.
Gert Hofmann, Department of German, University College Cork.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday 30th April 2009
"Towards new understandings of silence"
James G. R. Cronin, History of Art and Centre for Adult and Continuing Education, University College Cork.
Presentation Introduction:
Contemporary studies on silence are richly multi-disciplinary in nature. Studies on different types of silence include visual and spatial silence, as well as the relationships between silence, noise and sound. The value of recent scholarship has been to demonstrate how closely bound up silence is with other forms of communication -- oral, written, visual and musical. Silence can make listening and viewing more sensitive and in this sense silence is not an absence, but rather a powerful presence. The most beneficial studies on silence are those that have taken a phenomenological approach. This session will explore a phenomenological case study. “Fruit of Silence”, a reflective case study by Marilyn Nelson (2006), considers the role of silence/meditation, what she terms as “contemplative pedagogy”, as a learning tool in teaching a literature class to cadets being trained at West Point followed by cadet responses to silence during their military service in Iraq during the Second Gulf War (2003--). Through letters, two former West Point cadets, who subsequently became Black Hawk helicopter pilots, communicate how they used silence as a tool to centre themselves in times of anxiety while on campaign in a theatre of war. The session will project this study’s focus to survey recent multi-disciplinary approaches to silence with the purpose of asking: are new ontologies of silence emerging?
James G. R. Cronin, History of Art and Centre for Adult and Continuing Education, University College Cork.
Presentation Introduction:
Contemporary studies on silence are richly multi-disciplinary in nature. Studies on different types of silence include visual and spatial silence, as well as the relationships between silence, noise and sound. The value of recent scholarship has been to demonstrate how closely bound up silence is with other forms of communication -- oral, written, visual and musical. Silence can make listening and viewing more sensitive and in this sense silence is not an absence, but rather a powerful presence. The most beneficial studies on silence are those that have taken a phenomenological approach. This session will explore a phenomenological case study. “Fruit of Silence”, a reflective case study by Marilyn Nelson (2006), considers the role of silence/meditation, what she terms as “contemplative pedagogy”, as a learning tool in teaching a literature class to cadets being trained at West Point followed by cadet responses to silence during their military service in Iraq during the Second Gulf War (2003--). Through letters, two former West Point cadets, who subsequently became Black Hawk helicopter pilots, communicate how they used silence as a tool to centre themselves in times of anxiety while on campaign in a theatre of war. The session will project this study’s focus to survey recent multi-disciplinary approaches to silence with the purpose of asking: are new ontologies of silence emerging?
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Thursday 19th March 2009
“Badiou and Deleuze: Multiplicity and Event and the Art of Bacon and Rauschenberg”
David Brancaleone, Limerick School of Art and Design
David Brancaleone is a cultural historian with a background in publishing and fine art. He is Acting Course leader in Critical and Contextual Studies (Fine Art) at Limerick School of Art and Design where he lectures in art history and theory.
Paper Introduction:
David is considering the consequences of Alain Badiou’s thought for a social history of art. Bearing in mind the first Eye and Mind paper, he plans is to discuss multiplicity and the philosophy of the event, with in mind Deleuze’s version of multiplicity and to extend the analysis to the works of Rauschenberg and Francis Bacon, from a Badiouian perspective.
The other agenda the paper proposes to address can be formulated with this question: given that art and politics lie at the heart of Badiou’s thought in recent years (being two of his philosophy’s four foundations, what he terms its ‘conditions’); given that he defines truth as: “a new universality against the forced universality of globalization”, where is his art truth-event located, in relation to art history today? Grounding the discussion in the works of Bacon, Rauschenberg, we will explore such questions by drawing selectively on Badiou’s Being and the Event, Infinite Thought, The Century (a reappraisal of High Modernism); the Handbook of Inaesthetics in which he tackles what he calls “the intraphilosophical effects of the single works of art” and “Affirmationist Art Manifesto” in Polemics.
The paper functions on two levels: eyeing the empirical specifics of the art object – the works of Francis Bacon and Robert Rauschenberg paintings (not seen as self-referential, but located in an artistic sequence) – while being mindful of concepts foreign to traditional art historical approaches.
In preparation for this seminar, David has provided some introductory paragraphs on a number of key aspects of Badiou’s thought:
1) Badiou and the Event
2) Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art
3) Ways in which Badiou’s philosophy impacts on social history of art
David has also prepared a Bibliography of texts on Badiou for your reference. This document may be downloaded from the Eye and Mind events page.
David Brancaleone, Limerick School of Art and Design
David Brancaleone is a cultural historian with a background in publishing and fine art. He is Acting Course leader in Critical and Contextual Studies (Fine Art) at Limerick School of Art and Design where he lectures in art history and theory.
Paper Introduction:
David is considering the consequences of Alain Badiou’s thought for a social history of art. Bearing in mind the first Eye and Mind paper, he plans is to discuss multiplicity and the philosophy of the event, with in mind Deleuze’s version of multiplicity and to extend the analysis to the works of Rauschenberg and Francis Bacon, from a Badiouian perspective.
The other agenda the paper proposes to address can be formulated with this question: given that art and politics lie at the heart of Badiou’s thought in recent years (being two of his philosophy’s four foundations, what he terms its ‘conditions’); given that he defines truth as: “a new universality against the forced universality of globalization”, where is his art truth-event located, in relation to art history today? Grounding the discussion in the works of Bacon, Rauschenberg, we will explore such questions by drawing selectively on Badiou’s Being and the Event, Infinite Thought, The Century (a reappraisal of High Modernism); the Handbook of Inaesthetics in which he tackles what he calls “the intraphilosophical effects of the single works of art” and “Affirmationist Art Manifesto” in Polemics.
The paper functions on two levels: eyeing the empirical specifics of the art object – the works of Francis Bacon and Robert Rauschenberg paintings (not seen as self-referential, but located in an artistic sequence) – while being mindful of concepts foreign to traditional art historical approaches.
In preparation for this seminar, David has provided some introductory paragraphs on a number of key aspects of Badiou’s thought:
1) Badiou and the Event
2) Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art
3) Ways in which Badiou’s philosophy impacts on social history of art
David has also prepared a Bibliography of texts on Badiou for your reference. This document may be downloaded from the Eye and Mind events page.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Discussion: visuality across disciplines
The current discussion topic on this forum centres on the capacity of neurological models to deal with artistic problems and potentials. Contributors include Dr. Ed Krčma (History of Art, University College Cork), Prof. James Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Mr. John Paul McMahon (PhD candidate, History of Art, University College Cork) and Dr. Joel Walmsley (Department of Philosophy, University College Cork).
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Thursday 19th February 2009
Liam Lenihan (National University of Ireland Centennial Postdoctoral Fellow in Irish Studies School of English & History of Art) presented the second session in the Eye & Mind research forum series. His lecture was entitled: "Blake's Four Zoas and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: Unfinished "Ends" to Unending Narratives".
Abstract:
William Blake's poem, The Four Zoas, survives in one unfinished manuscript. Los, the fallen narrator, relates the Fall of Man to us and contemplates a return again to grace, to Salvation from the vegetative world of birth, generation and extinction. Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow, also represents a fall: the techno-bureaucratic manner by which a portion of mankind – named the elect – control and constrict those who serve them – deemed, the preterite. Therefore, in different contexts, both works seek to capture the indeterminate nature of human understanding in the sense of the race being condemned to a fallen state. Both works seek a sublime vision born of the fallen, material world; a vision of the transcendent. The complex private construction of each work (Blake's mythology; Pynchon's fantasy-realist fictions) make these visions very difficult for the writers to realise, and more so, for the reader to apprehend.
Click on the links:
Blake's Four Zoas The site illustrates two plates from The Four Zoas, with Blake's mythological characters. On the top, the plate captioned "Urizen weakens Orc by stretching him on the Tree of Mystery," emphasizes Orc's Christ-like identity; while the large plate on the bottom shows Enitharmon confronted by Orc in the shape of a serpent, an indication of the complex and shifting nature of Blake's mythological world.
Marsha Keith Schuchard on William Blake
Gravity's Rainbow cover art
Pynchon Online
Abstract:
William Blake's poem, The Four Zoas, survives in one unfinished manuscript. Los, the fallen narrator, relates the Fall of Man to us and contemplates a return again to grace, to Salvation from the vegetative world of birth, generation and extinction. Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow, also represents a fall: the techno-bureaucratic manner by which a portion of mankind – named the elect – control and constrict those who serve them – deemed, the preterite. Therefore, in different contexts, both works seek to capture the indeterminate nature of human understanding in the sense of the race being condemned to a fallen state. Both works seek a sublime vision born of the fallen, material world; a vision of the transcendent. The complex private construction of each work (Blake's mythology; Pynchon's fantasy-realist fictions) make these visions very difficult for the writers to realise, and more so, for the reader to apprehend.
This paper explores readings that attempt to "complete" both works. It argues the following: firstly, there is an overlap between peculiar methodological problems in approaches to Blake's poem and Pynchon's novel; secondly, that there is a 'parallax gap' between unfinished 'ends' that "complete" readings of the works (in both texts, for material and literary reasons) and the unending narratives the run throughout The Four Zoas and Gravity's Rainbow. It will argue that between unfinished 'ends' and unending narratives there is a parallax which will be connected to a critique of certain aspects of postmodernism. Though it sounds theoretical, the paper is not meant to obfuscate either work and attention will be paid to the material condition of both works - especially aspects of Blake's Four Zoas manuscript.
Click on the links:
Blake's Four Zoas The site illustrates two plates from The Four Zoas, with Blake's mythological characters. On the top, the plate captioned "Urizen weakens Orc by stretching him on the Tree of Mystery," emphasizes Orc's Christ-like identity; while the large plate on the bottom shows Enitharmon confronted by Orc in the shape of a serpent, an indication of the complex and shifting nature of Blake's mythological world.
Marsha Keith Schuchard on William Blake
Gravity's Rainbow cover art
Pynchon Online
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