Eye and Mind

11 November, River Room, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, 6.00 – 7.30

2010-11-01T05:02:00.001-07:00

Adam Loughnane (Philosophy, UCC)

Merleau-Ponty: Ecstasis, Trust and Artistic Practices as Philosophic Practices

In his writings on painting, Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers an account of artistic activity where perception functions in an ecstatic relation through which new types of vision and action are made possible. Placing his reflections on artistic practice in a philosophic context, Merleau-Ponty allows us to compare these artistic practices with the academic/philosophic practices we rely on to engage phenomenological works such as his. The ways of seeing and acting enabled in artistic activity, as Merleau-Ponty understands them, the engagement with visibility and invisibility and the attunement afforded between body and world, challenge the deeply ingrained notions of perception, doubt and understanding upon which our philosophic practices are based. If there is value in thinking with Merleau-Ponty and experimenting with his concepts and philosophy, can we do so authentically while maintaining philosophic practices which are based on the concepts he seeks to replace? If not, can the artistic practices themselves supplement or replace aspects of our philosophic practices?

Wednesday May 26th, 6.30-8pm, O’Rahilly Building, UCC, Room 123.

2010-05-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

Sabine Kriebel: Left-wing Humour, or, Heartfield’s Holy Hate

“Holy hate,” according to Georg Lukács, is the driving force behind penetrating social satire, its Marxist ‘holiness’ rooted in a political ethics of equity that prevents parodic forms from becoming trite or vulgar. This paper interrogates the politics of subversive laughter in John Heartfield’s AIZ photomontages, demonstrating that while his motivations might be holy in Lukács’ lexicon, his pictorial tactics are mischievously regressive, grotesque and often in bad taste. Embedded in contemporaneous theories of critical humour, this paper proposes to take Heartfield’s transgressive play seriously as a radical political tactic, shedding light on an often-overlooked aspect of interwar Marxism.

Ed Krčma: Wols, Smallness and Creaturely Life

The first post-war exhibition of German-born artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) consisted entirely of drawings. These tiny raw worlds, set down ‘on little scraps of paper,’ were compared by Jean-Paul Sartre to ‘pullulating viruses under a microscope.’ Rather than developing the kind of poetics of angst in relation to which Wols’ work has often been discussed, this paper offers a phenomenological reading of his drawings, taking their remarkable smallness as a starting point. Smallness in Wols is immersive and vertiginous, lending the drawings a magnitude in the imagination, as these teeming worlds are brought up arrestingly close. In thinking about the stakes of such a project for making art in a devastated post-war France, I will also briefly explore the usefulness of Eric Santner’s concept of ‘creaturely life’. For Santner, this term refers to the realm of compulsions and excitations, where the animal and human are brought into a peculiar proximity by the latter’s exposure to the exertions of sovereign power and uncanny desire.

Next Session: Wednesday 31st March, 6.30-8pm, O’Rahilly Building (ORB 212).

2010-03-29T14:08:00.000-07:00

We are now in a smaller seminar space in the O’Rahilly Building (ORB 212). For a map of the campus, please follow this link

We are pleased to welcome Mr. J.P. McMahon, who lectures for the Centre for Adult Continuing Education and is a PhD candidate with History of Art at UCC. JP has provided the following title and abstract for a talk on American artist Vito Acconci:

The Eye, the Mind, and the Disappearance of the Body: Vito Acconci, 1969-1973

This paper examines the performance/conceptual work of Vito Acconci produced between the years 1969 and 1973, and questions the relationship of the artist's performances to specific notions of the physical and material body. Though Acconci’s performances were made on, with and in the body, the resulting art was for the beholder always one for the eye or the mind rather than the body; that is to say, it affected the beholder perceptually and conceptually rather than physically. While this separation of the eye, the mind, and the body may seem somewhat reductive, it is deeply pertinent for an art historical examination of the formal and physical effects of Acconci's work on the beholder. This paper will also align Michael Fried's notion of absorption and theatricality with the art of Acconci, examining the latter in relation to Fried’s conception of the eye, the mind, and the body, which in turn were crucial to his understanding of modernism both critically and historically.

Next Session: Thursday 25th February, 6.30-8pm.

2010-02-08T02:21:00.000-08:00

figura serpentinata in Art and Poetry: A Comparative Reading of Frank O'Hara's 'In Memory of My Feelings'
Dr Sam Ladkin
Department of English, UCC

My current project seeks to revivify a critical terminology derived from the rhetoric of art of the Italian Renaissance, in particular that which surrounds the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. This terminology illuminates, I hope, the seminal work of Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), a gay poet of the “New York School”, an art critic, curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and a friend to many of the major artists and poets (and composers and dancers...) of the 1940s through the 1960s. The term figura serpentinata, a term attributed to Michelangelo, describes the serpent-like twist in the pose of the (male) body, and is arguably reprised in O’Hara’s seminal 'In Memory of My Feelings'. Or rather, that is what I will argue.

You are encouraged to read Frank O'Hara's 'In Memory of My Feelings' prior to this talk, mostly because it is splendid.

Next Session: Thursday 28th January (6.30 – 8.00pm) in West Wing 6, UCC

2010-01-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

Please note the change of venue – if you’re not very familiar with UCC, the room is on the western side of the main quad. This month we are very pleased to welcome Chris Clark, Curator of Education and Collections at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, who will be giving a talk on Guy Debord entitled:

Memoranda for a Series of Histories: Guy Debord and Dissimulation

WEDNESDAY 18th: Eye and Mind : Art and Locality - A multi-disciplinary panel discussion. CIT Crawford College 6-8pm

2009-11-18T00:57:00.000-08:00

This is a reminder concerning this evening’s meeting of Eye and Mind, this time in association with Art Trail and the Crawford College of Art and Design. As part of the events accompanying the ArtTrail festival, a roundtable will take place in the Crawford College of Art lecture theatre on Wednesday 18th November, 6-8pm. Please note the change of time, date and venue from our usual slot at the Glucksman. The subject of the roundtable (following that of Art Trail more broadly) is ‘Locality,’ and I am delighted to announce the following participants:

Stephen Brandes is an artist whose work is particularly engaged with cartographic practices and has been described as a kind of ‘absurdist travelogue,’ combining fantastical elements with deadpan humour and dry social commentaries. Stephen represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

Maureen Considine is an artist from and based in Cork, whose work uses lens based media to explore social formations in the city. Exhibiting widely, Maureen also completed a residency at the Cork Film Centre which culminated in an exhibition of new work at the Triskel Arts Centre in 2006.

Kieran Keohane is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at UCC, whose research interests include the sociological analysis of urban life. His most recent book, co-authored with Carmen Kuhling, is entitled Collision Culture: Transformations in Everyday Life in Ireland (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2004).

Each participant will deliver a short presentation on how their work relates to the issue of locality; I will then moderate a conversation between our speakers before opening the discussion out to the audience. I would also like to offer my thanks to Chris Clarke at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery for organising this great line-up of speakers – it is much appreciated.

Hope to see you there,

Ed

Thursday 22nd October in the River Room at the Glucksman Gallery, 6.30-8.00pm.

2009-10-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Dr. Julia Jansen, Philosophy Department, University College Cork,
will be giving a talk entitled:

“Relational and Participatory Practices: Committed Art or Art for Art’s Sake?”

Forthcoming session: Thursday 17th September, 6.30 – 8pm.

2009-09-13T04:47:00.000-07:00

Casting shadows in mud, myth and memory

Dr. Róisín O’Gorman Drama & Theatre Studies, University College Cork.

This presentation will look at work by William Kentridge, Dorothy Cross, and Ana Mendieta to understand how they provoke awareness of seeing as a relentless activity, constantly shaped by the (often) invisible forces of technology, history and affect. In examples such as Kentridge’s Black Box (2005), Cross’s Medusae (2003) and Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1970s-80s) they puncture habits of perception as they play with the processes, technologies and mythologies of seeing. Working with the aesthetics and languages of shadows they flip the dominant modes of a culture still caught in the thrall of the Enlightenment and its positivist politics. The camera and the eye often function to elide the failures of perception, offering glossy truths and impenetrable images of perfection. Kentridge, Cross, and Mendieta instead use the failures within seeing to expose the dark fissures in perception and the destructive consequences of that elision.

Thursday 20th August, 6.30 – 8pm.

2009-08-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

Matt Packer (Curator, Lewis Glucksman Gallery)

British Photography in the Thatcher Years

The talk will profile ten photographers that variously sought new modes of documenting the social and cultural fabric of British society, during Margaret Thatcher’s reign as Prime Minister of Great Britain between 1979 and 1990.

24/7

2009-08-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

River Room,Lewis Glucksman Gallery,Thursday 9th July, 3.00 – 4.30pm

24/7 is Eye and Mind’s contribution to The Avant – the 10-day festival of progressive arts that opens in Cork on Saturday night (www.theavant.wordpress.com). For 24/7, 6 speakers will be given 7 minutes to discuss 24 slides on their topic of choice. The format is designed to generate short, energetic talks on art and culture which move fast and provoke debate. Here we welcome artists, curators and art historians to try their hand at such speedy delivery.

Speakers:
Chris Clarke (Curator of Education and Collections, Lewis Glucksman Gallery): ‘Online Aesthetics’
Claire Feeley (Glucksman Fellow in Curatorial Practice): ‘Talk Radio’
Dr. David Brancaleone (Critical and Contextual Studies, Limerick School of Art and Design): ‘Art and Numbers’
Rachel Warriner and Jimmy Cummins (Artists based in Cork): ‘The Life and Times of Nathaniel Turner’
Ciara Moore (Artist based in Dublin): ‘Alexander’s Dark Band’
Dr. Ed Krčma (History of Art, UCC): ‘Diagramming Value’

Details of future events will follow shortly. . .

2009-06-26T03:12:00.000-07:00

Roundtable on Skill: Thursday 25th June, 6.30 – 8pm.

2009-06-10T05:40:00.000-07:00

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)

Thursday 21st May, 6.30pm River Room, Glucksman Gallery, Cork

2009-05-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

"Synopsis of Redemption and Abjection: On the Literary History of Raphael’s Transfiguration"
Gert Hofmann, Department of German, University College Cork.

Thursday 30th April 2009

2009-03-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

"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?

Thursday 19th March 2009

2009-03-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

“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.

Discussion: visuality across disciplines

2009-02-19T08:46:00.000-08:00

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).

You can post a comment by clicking on 'links to this post' below, this will open up to a link inviting you to 'post a comment', click on this link to add your comment in the dialogue box, click the 'publish your comment' tab to add your comment to this thread.

Thursday 19th February 2009

2009-01-21T06:22:00.000-08:00

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.

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

Thursday 15th January 2009

2008-12-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

Ed Krčma presented the first lecture in the Eye and Mind interdisciplinary forum entitled "The Mind as a Running Transformer:" Affect and Diagram in Robert Rauschenberg’s Small Rebus on 15th January 2009 in the River Room, downstairs at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery.