 potential of inherently ephemeral work – from the radical event-orientated gestures of the 1970s to interventionist strategies in contemporary artistic praxis. Artists to be studied include Francis Alÿs, Lygia Clark, Keren Cytterand Tino Seghal.
In the light of the provision of dedicated space for performance and live events with Tate Modern’s forthcoming expansion, this project will examine the positing of performance-orientated work in the ritualistic space of the contemporary art museum and problematise the complex status of the art museum as both site and stage. What is at stake in the performative construction of meaning in this context and how might its broader societal implications be understood given the pivotal place occupied by performance in contemporary art today?
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award is intended to contribute towards a forthcoming exhibition at Tate St Ives in 2014, touring to the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima). The doctorate will contribute directly to the exhibition by establishing new connections and contexts surrounding the art created in St Ives between 1948 and 1960.
The research will focus on particular connections formed between the artists of St Ives and other leading exponents of international abstraction. It will consider the awareness these artists had of contemporary practices abroad – through publications, correspondences and visits to exhibitions – and investigate whether a sense of artistic exchange was an important factor for each artist’s practice. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the vast networks of exchange, in which many of these artists played a vital role, and to question the tendency in the critical history of St Ives to describe its art in regional or national terms.
Ioanna Zouli’s research seeks to investigate the hypothesis that the modes and practices through which museums embrace new media technologies are changing the way visitors engage with and experience the museum and its display of objects.
The research seeks to establish whether, and how, aesthetic experience as traditionally conceived is changing as a result of contemporary network culture and the use of digital technology. It also investigates how this relates to Tate’s own understanding, strategy and deployment of new media in communication and educational design, and what kinds of correspondence there might be between the museum’s and audiences’ digital habits. The research is framed by the question of whether digital technology is rapidly bringing about a convergence between producers and consumers of cultural content.
The research seeks to produce new understandings about the use of digital video in the mediation of the experience of and value for the art museum and to draw upon the conceptual insights of the AHRC/DMI-funded Tate Encounters research programme (2007–10).
More specifically, this study’s desired outcome is to contribute to knowledge via a new understanding of how digital video is deployed in Tate as a powerful medium, through which meaning is constructed and communicated in different contexts across the institution. It will draw attention to a narrative account of the working assumptions about the use of video as a medium across and within Tate’s departments, as well as reflecting the institution’s approach to digital technology.
The BMW Tate Live programme has been chosen as the core case study to observe Tate working with digital technologies. The project’s observations and its development may illuminate the ways in which digital projects are delivered and how the institution perceives the concept of curating digital spaces and platforms. Moreover, the dissertation aims to explore how new audiences are created through Tate’s video production and other media-based projects.
This AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award will explore how artists have engaged with Haiti as a key site in the ‘Black Atlantic’, taking Paul Gilroy’s concept as a starting point for interpretation. Haiti has become a key site partly because of the historical significance of the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent history of Haiti as an independent state, and particularly because of the ways in which artists have both celebrated the Haitian Revolution and struggled with its legacies. The project will adopt a historical approach, taking as its point of departure the art of the Harlem Renaissance, but it will also trace Haiti in art to the present (both as a site imagined by artists elsewhere and as a site where contemporary artists produce art). In addition to the PhD, a web-based resource on the concept of the Black Atlantic will be developed as a legacy of the Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic exhibition, along with the interactive debating space Black Atlantic Resource Debate.
Hayley Flynn’s research considers the application and meaning of landscape imagery in William Blake’s visual art. In part, the project seeks to re-examine Blake’s position within the history of British landscape painting. Though casual references to Blake have been made in various surveys of the genre – principally, as a precursor to the ‘visionary’ landscapes of Samuel Palmer – scholarship has traditionally been focussed on the artist’s written prophecies or ‘mythological system’ and, in art-historical terms, on the expression of these ideas in his figurative art. Despite the fact that Blake has been repeatedly cited by other landscape artists as a genuine artistic influence, this important aspect of his work remains under the radar of most scholars and critics. The first half of the thesis considers the tension between these two traditions about Blake. It seeks to highlight Blake’s legacy as a painter of landscape, from the time of his death in 1827 to the mid-twentieth century, when the discourse about Blake’s prophetic output was firmly established.
The second part of the thesis is focused on three works by Blake, in which landscape is particularly prominent – the illustrations to Virgil’s Eclogues, the illustrations to the Book of Job, and the illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. All three series date from the 1820s and were commissioned as a result of Blake’s friendship with the landscape painter John Linnell. This research examines the meaning, symbolism and sources for the coherent landscape settings Blake created for the series’ and, as a result, the enduring theory that Blake’s illustrations represent an expression of his mythological system is called into question.
The Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko stated in 1986, ‘Poland is marginalised less by lack of information about art in the West than by the lack of information about art in Poland in the West.’ A glaring lack of information on Polish art still persist in literature and teaching, with developments in Eastern European photography largely sidelined by North American and European histories. Attempting to redress this imbalance, Sabina Gill aims to explore the photographic practice of key artists and groups working in Poland since the 1960s, and interrogate ways in which Polish photography may challenge the histories and critical frameworks that govern Western European and Anglo-American discourses.
The post-1960s period marked a tumultuous phase in Polish history, years in which Poland was rebuilt in the wake of war and transformed both materially and culturally under communism. State-sponsored ‘official’ photography prospered, but some artists channelled energy into underground art movements and regional amateur photography clubs. Art historian Piotr Piotrowski has suggested that ‘post-war art history in Central-Eastern Europe should include more of a national or state perspective, rather than a universal one’, as the difficulty of artistic exchange between European states caused art to develop independently within each country. Is it possible or desirable to define a Polish photographic style? Can art produced in Poland be understood as orientated toward the distribution of coded information, as critics have suggested, rather than the creation of a unique art object? Has this function changed in the work of contemporary Polish photographers? With the collapse of Communism in Poland in 1989 and the transition to a more democratic state, artists were afforded greater freedom and enjoyed opportunities to travel and study internationally. Can a photograph signify in the same way to artists working under Communism as it does to later generations of Polish artists? Does the photograph possess a different significance to a Western scholar returning to the work in 2010?
This thesis traces the shifting currency of Greco-Roman corporealities in British academic art during the period 1800–40. The ‘classical nude’ is defined as any unclothed or lightly draped figure in painting or sculpture whose appearance follows the templates provided by ancient Hellenic sculpture. This project does not centre on the human body. Rather, the classical nude is held as an abstract projection of that body, a fantasy of human physicality in which meaning is concentrated in contour, outline and surface.
In the years leading up to 1800, the classical nude possessed a political charge related to the utopian ideals of radical and republican politics, both in Britain and in France. For certain artists and politicians, the beauty of the classical nude embodied the apex of human potential, and thus became a symbol of egalitarian rights and the rhetoric of universal liberty. Yet, with the exception of the arguably anti-classical William Hogarth, the fine arts in Britain had virtually no history outside of aristocratic patronage and upper-class grand tourism.
Since the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, casts of ancient statues had become the primary tool for academic artistic practice, making the classical nude a fundamentally institutional entity in an establishment under the auspices of the King. Classical culture itself remained largely the preserve of the ruling elite, both Whig and Tory, while patronage remained private and the Academy remained ‘Royal’. It is in this dual function as radical icon and establishment cornerstone that the classical nude existed in British art at the beginning of this project. The Napoleonic Wars changed the geographical and material boundaries of British artistic production, and as the period advanced, the polemical uses and political meanings of the classical nude mutated. In sharp contrast to the ideological emblem it had been just decades earlier, the classical nude became seen as an evasion of depth, meaning and politics.
As part of the collaborative element of the degree, Cora Gilroy-Ware has prepared catalogue entries on a number