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

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.

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

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. . .

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)

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.

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?