Event Archive

• Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism

  Life Support is curated by Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha and Catherine Spencer.

  14th August - 16th October

  Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism is a research project which includes a group exhibition in August – October 2021 which takes the history and collections of the Glasgow Women’s Library as a starting point to explore how art and activist production from the 1970s through to the contemporary moment have challenged existing systems of care, support and maintenance, and imagined vital alternatives.

  Focusing on the intersections between feminist, LGBTQ+ and decolonial organising, and looking across private life and public infrastructures, Life Support asks: what are the support structures needed to maintain life – including housing, education, physical and mental health care, ecologies, education and food? Who is included and excluded from them? How have individuals and communities locally and transnationally organised to gain access to these systems, and to change them? What expanded notions of ‘life support’ have been pursued via activism, strikes and protest, but also ritual, utopianism, and alternative spaces and domesticities? How might housing, rent struggles and anti-gentrification overlap with ecological concerns, queer imaginaries and intersectional feminism? How have artistic communities of care challenged private and state attempts to control whose lives get support?

  Life Support is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC/UKRI), the Henry Moore Foundation, the Art Fund/Garfield Weston, the University of Edinburgh History of Art Department, the St Andrews School of Art History, and the Contemporary Art Research Collection at the University of Edinburgh.

  

• The Digital Medieval Manuscript: Expert Meeting

  Organised by by Prof. Kathryn Rudy and Suzette van Haaren, School of Art History, University of St Andrews (Scotland)

  Description

  This expert meeting will take place 8 October 2021, from 15:00-19:00 BST. It is hosted by Prof. Kathryn Rudy and Suzette van Haaren, School of Art History, University of St Andrews (Scotland). Panel discussions will centre on pre-recorded and pre-circulated talks. Please reserve a ticket to take your seat in the audience for the discussions. Tickets are free.

  Issues to be discussed
  In a single click, a tap or swipe, the medieval manuscript appears on our screens: thousands of pixels light up and the ancient book lies open before us, in our office rather than in the reading room. The digital images emulate the book-like object in a two page-spread, or even animate it with graphics that turn its pages. We move through a digital facsimile that is reminiscent of its physical counterpart, and simultaneously is strange and new. What we see is familiar: age-stained parchment, neat script, colourful miniatures and gilded details. But we do not feel the subtle flexibility and soft skin of the parchment between our fingers as we turn the page — instead we feel the hard plastic of our mouse or trackpad, or the glass of our screens. The digital manuscript facsimile is not a medieval manuscript. Yet, the digital is fundamentally connected to parchment pages inscribed, decorated and bound in the Middle Ages.

  The digital medieval manuscript has become exceedingly important for how medieval parchment codices are handled, studied and preserved. Libraries, museums and rare book collections are increasingly digitising their material, making objects more accessible to a larger public. Medieval manuscripts are being handled much more in digital environments than they are in reading rooms. Critically examining the effects of digitisation is fundamental to understand how medieval manuscripts move through the world today. The digital environment poses new affordances and constraints, bringing up many practical and ontological questions and ideas surrounding the medieval manuscript and its digital counterpart.

  The event
  We have invited experts in the field ranging from academics to digitisation specialists (and all overlaps imaginable) to talk about the digitsation of medieval manuscripts. The panel members have sent in videos. These will be available online from 1 October 2021 for everyone to watch.

  During the expert meeting itself the panel members will engage in discussions surrounding their specific video topics. Audience members are encouraged to ask questions that contribute to the discussions.

• 'The Immanence of Empire: Architecture, Timber and Supply Chains in Interwar Britain' - Art History Research Lecture

  Organised by Dr Sam Rose, University of St Andrews. September 15th.

  The School of Art History presented the first Research lecture from Dr Neal Shasore of the London School of Architecture on ‘The Immanence of Empire: Architecture, Timber and Supply Chains in Interwar Britain'.

• Venice In Blue Conference

  Organised by Prof. Laura Moretti, Alexa McCarthy and Paolo Sachet, University of St Andrews. September 2nd-3rd.

  Introduction to the Online Exhibition

  At the turn of the sixteenth-century, handmade blue paper (carta azzurra) emerged as a chosen support for drawing, printing, and publishing in Venice. Blue paper was first codified in a 1389 Bolognese statute that delineated standards for price, weight, quality, and size, was produced on the terraferma, and used widely by Italian draughtsman beginning in the mid- to late fifteenth century. However, the proliferation that took place in Venice between 1500 and 1550 has led to the association of carta azzurra with the northern Italian city. Artists like Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1460–ca. 1526), Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480–1556), Titian (ca. 1488–1576), Sebastiano del Piombo (ca. 1485–1547), and Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19–1594) utilised this support for drawings to explore the tonal effects of light and shade on colour. At the same time, publishers like Aldo Manuzio (ca. 1445–1515) and Francesco Marcolini (ca. 1500–after 1559) printed books on blue paper, capturing the interplay of the materials and contents that form the page.

  This online exhibition brings together sixteenth-century Venetian artworks on blue paper from international collections, highlighting the readily available material’s efficacy, in concert with a variety of media and for an array of purposes, in conveying tonality through a limited chromatic scale. Including drawings, prints, and books on blue paper, and arranged according to the four themes of The Human Form, Antiquity, Mythology, and Allegory, The Celestial Realm, and Creating Space and Composing Action, this exhibition demonstrates the wide-ranging significance of the material for artistic purposes, spanning an aray of techniques, and subjects. Though, throughout, the function of blue paper is to enhance the tonal range of a composition, the confluence of material and subject conveys the unique intended function and impact of each artwork.

  Please note that over time, blue paper often becomes discoloured, appearing to be brownish, yellowish, grey, or green. Though some of the papers in this exhibition no longer look blue, the material is inherently blue paper, or carta azzurra.

  Conference Programme

• The Itinerant Image: Printmaking between Art and Science in Enlightenment Britain

  Online Symposium, University of St Andrews, 12–13 August 2021

  Organised by Dr Stephanie O’Rourke (St Andrews) and Dr Katie Reinhart (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History)

  In early modern Britain, the printed image was a major practical and conceptual tool for scientists. As recent research into the graphic practices of the Royal Society has shown, illustrations and diagrams were indispensable to communicating scientific knowledge, both collectively and by individuals. In particular printed images circulated between the Royal Society’s periodicals and the published volumes of its fellows. Some of these images, such as the flea from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (London 1665), subsequently became widely reproduced and iconic images in the history of science. Yet these printed images were rarely confined to scientific domains; not only were they usually the result of collaboration with artisans and in some cases artists, but the most successful images would often circulate far beyond the scientific communities for which they were initially produced. Further still, images were often copied or translated into new locations, where their meaning might be altered for new audiences.

  Over two days, this symposium brings together scholars and curators of British art, science, and print culture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to interrogate the creation, use, and function of prints in the production of new scientific knowledge. It considers how the ‘epistemic’ value of an image changed as it was reprinted, adapted, and modified; and pays particular attention to how and when a reproduced image might gain or lose scientific authority. This event was generously funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the School of Art History.

• Photographic Art Reproductions, from 1839 to the Present

  Organised by Sofya Dmitrieva, University of St Andrews, July 23rd 2021.

  The photographic art reproduction came into being simultaneously with the invention of the medium: Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce captured engravings in his earliest heliographs, while William Henry Fox Talbot praised the reproductive capacities of the calotype in The Pencil of Nature (1844).

  As much as art has affected photographic reproduction (for instance, Louis Daguerre who arranged sculptural pieces into elaborate still lives recalling those by Dutch Golden Age masters or, perhaps, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin), the reproduction has affected art. As Walter Benjamin has influentially argued, it put the 'aura' of the original into question. Together with Paul Valery and Erwin Panofsky, Benjamin sparked a century-long debate on the interrelationship between the original and the copy, which is still far from any decisive conclusion with Peter Walsh, Michelle Henning, Georges Didi-Huberman and Bruno Latour readdressing the problem in the last decade.

  What is more, the other aspects of the photographic reproduction have received much less scholarly attention. Despite the valuable efforts of Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Stephen Bann and Patrizia Di Bello, there is still much to be discovered with regards to its materiality, function, and reception:

  • What technical challenges has photographic reproduction faced since the appearance of the medium and how has it resolved them?
  • How have new technologies changed the relationship between the original and the copy?
  • What were the multiple uses of photographic reproductions?
  • What do they tell us about the aesthetic taste of their day?
  • What impact has the photographic reproduction had on the fine arts since the nineteenth century?
  • Does it itself have any artistic value?

   

• Dar to Dunoon: Modern African Art from the Argyll Collection

  Exhibition, Dunoon, 21st May to 13th June

   

  Organised by Dr. Kate Cowcher and involving two then Art History undergraduates, Meredith Loper and Elikem Logan

   

  Dar to Dunoon: Modern African Art from the Argyll Collection was an exhibition at Dunoon Burgh Hall that showcased twelve works of modern art from East and South Africa, made in the 1960s and 70s.  It was accompanied by a podcast series.

   

  The paintings and prints bought by the writer Naomi Mitchison for the Argyll Collection, a publicly funded initiative she started in 1960 to acquire art for use in rural Scottish schools. The majority of works in the collection are Scottish, but these works from Africa constitute a small but highly significant part. Until recently, the details of these works had been lost or overlooked in the years since their acquisition. Artist names and titles were missing, along with the story of how they came to be in Scotland.

   

  Dar to Dunoon was the culmination of a research project, began in 2018 by Dr. Kate Cowcher and involving two then Art History undergraduates, Meredith Loper and Elikem Logan. The project traced the stories of these works and confirmed attributions for ten out of twelve of them. The paintings and prints, by some of Africa's most notable modernist artists, document the diversity of creativity in the early years of independence in countries such as Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.

   

  In addition to the exhibition, resources for schools were produced and Dar to Dunoon featured examples of creative writing and visual art produced by primary children in Argyll as part of the first pilot workshops using African modern art in the classroom. Further resources are being developed, to be released in time for Black History Month 2021.

   

  For more information on the project or the exhibition, visit dartodunoon.com.

• Pluriversality at Play: Art and material culture in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean

  Organised by Dr Anthi Androniku, University of St Andrews June 17th - 18th.

  The Mediterranean has always been a ‘contact zone’, a place of convergence and divergence, of peaceful co-existence, as well as of war and conflict. Although the medieval Mediterranean was an area of cultural commonalities, it was also a place of religious, political and military oppositions.

  It was a fluid space of communication, negotiation and contestation for Muslim, Jewish and Christian worldviews, as well as a locus of ambiguities, syncretism and blurred boundaries, a zone that enabled borderline cultures to emerge and flourish.

  This workshop, organised by Dr Anthi Andronikou, aims to relocate regional arts and cultures within a broader Mediterranean context from an interdisciplinary point of view. Scholars in the fields of Byzantine, Islamic, Jewish and Western Medieval studies will probe interconnections across different ethnic, political, artistic and confessional spheres through historical and art historical perspectives. The workshop is part of the global encounters and exchanging theme of the School of Art History.

  Keynote Lectures by Anne Derbes, Robert Hillenbrand, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Amy Neff

  Full Programme

• Grassroots: Artmaking and Political Struggle

  Oranised by Dr Amy Tobin (University of Cambridge) and Dr Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews), April 29th - 3rd June.

  This series of online events, Grassroots: Artmaking and Political Struggle, explores relationships between art, activism and political organising in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Across six panels over three days, speakers will take a number of different approaches to thinking about how art works and visual culture both interrelate with, and have acted as, catalysts for social change. Papers range from considerations of how artists have created alternative infrastructures, intervened in state organisations, worked together collaboratively, engaged with labour and activist struggles, as well as established channels of production, circulation and distribution. Using feminist, decolonial and queer theoretical approaches, the speakers address how intersections between art making and political struggle in Britain during these decades transformed culture in ways that continue to resonate with the contemporary moment.

  You can view the recordings on the Kettle's Yard website.