Outside the Material World, Tate Modern

Thomson and Craighead will be talking about recent work at Tate Modern on December 12th as part of this event – do come along if you are able:

+ Outside the Material World. Saturday 12 December 2009,
11.00–17.00 Starr Auditorium, Level 2, Tate Modern

To coincide with the exhibition Pop Life: Art in the Material World, this symposium explores artists’ relationships to the market from the 1970s to the present by focusing on mail and ephemeral art outside the market, and in collections and exhibitions today. Given the present financial crisis, strategies of insertion and the circulation of art are reassessed by artists, curators, archivists and academics.

Speakers: Felipe Ehrenberg, Professor Dawn Ades, Thomson and Craighead, Michael Asbury, Adrian Glew, Cristina Freire and, co-curators of Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Alison Gingeras & Catherine Wood.

See: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/20640.htm for booking information and details of the full programme

Pound at the Poly: A Chronology

A very successful one-day colloquium at 309 Regent Street celebrating the centenary of Ezra Pound’s lectures at the Regent Street Polytechnic on Friday 4th, with presentations from Massimo Bacigalupo, Walter Baumann, Becky Beasley, Helen Carr, Nick Selby and biographer David Moody, in front of an audience also including Ian Bell and Peter Brooker, among many others.

As an addendum to the day’s events, here’s a chronology of Pound’s involvement with the old Polytechnic: Continue reading Pound at the Poly: A Chronology

Why middlebrow matters

Wednesday 9th December, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Mary Grover (Sheffield Hallam University)
‘Why Middlebrow Matters’

Free to all.

Book launch

Michael Nath & Anne Witchard Book Launch
Monday 14 December 2009
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, 6pm onwards

Two members of the Institute are launching their new books at Westminster on the 14^th December. Michael Nath will be reading from his first novel, La Rochelle, published by Route, while Anne Witchard will be introducing her marvellous monograph Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown.

Whitechapel Salon: Peter Osborne

                                                                                                                

Following on from discussions with Gayatri Spivak, Chantal Mouffe and Richard Sennett, in the final session of the current series of Whitechapel Salon events on the theme of ‘hope’ Peter Osborne, author of The Politics of Time (1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000) and Conceptual Art (2002), and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, will be in discussion with his fellow editor at Radical Philosophy, and Deputy Director of the Institute, David Cunningham.

Book now to avoid disappointment! You can do so here.

Tickets: £7/£5

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org

No future

The final event in the series on The Future at the David Roberts Art Foundation took place last Thursday, ending with a bang not a whimper. Presentations from Garin Dowd, IMCC affiliate Stephen Melville, and last minute guest Alev Adil covered Derrida and Deleuze, Beckett and Ballard, and resulted in a fiesty discussion about Thierry Henry‘s already infamous handball, as well as the dystopian/utopian virtues of Kraftwerk. We hope to post a selection of some of the papers from the series on this site soon.

The 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference

Start date: 27 May 2010 12.00pm
End date: 29 May 2010 4.00pm  
Hosts: University of Westminster
(organised by NYU, University of the Arts London, and University of Westminster)
Cost: £50/£25 concs.
Download a booking form here 

Confirmed contributors: Glen Adamson (RCA/V&A); Dipti Bhagat (London Met); Lisa Cartwright (UC, San Diego); Sarah Chaplin (Greenwich); Will Cobbing (Wimbledon College of Art); David Cunningham (Westminster); Mark Dunhill (Central Saint Martins); Esther Gabara (Duke); Elizabeth Guffey (SUNY, Purchase); Raiford Guins (SUNY, Stony Brook); Gary Hall (Coventry); Michael Ann Holly (The Clark Institute); Guy Julier (Leeds Met); Esther Leslie (Birkbeck); Stephen Melville (Ohio State); Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU); W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago); Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins); Keith Moxey (Columbia); Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck); Griselda Pollock (Leeds); Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths); Joy Sleeman (Slade); Marquard Smith (Westminster); Penny Spark (Kingston); Marita Sturken (NYU); Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Durham); Victoria Walsh (Tate Britain); Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths) 

Ezra Pound programme announced

Ezra Pound and Modern Criticism: 100 Years in London
Friday 4 December 2009, 9.30-5.00
Cayley Room (room 152), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

The programme is now available for the day’s anniversary celebration of Pound’s lectures at the Poly:

9.30                            Coffee/Tea

10.00                         Introduction

10.15-11.30            Session One
Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa, ‘The Didactic Muse’
Walter Baumann, Ulster, ‘“Swinburne My Only Miss” (82/543): Snapshots from Pound’s London Years’

11.45-1.15             Session Two
Helen Carr, Goldsmiths, ‘Pound and “World-Poetry”’
Nick Selby, UEA, ‘“Found Full of Nomads”: Pound as American Critic in Patria Mia and Cathay’

1.15-2.30             Lunch

2.30-4.00             Session Three
Rebecca Beasley, University of Oxford, ‘Pound’s New Criticism’
David Moody, University of York, ‘This is Not A Philological Work’

4.15-5.15             Round Table and Final Discussion

Allan Stoekl public lecture

Professor Allan Stoekl (Penn State University), ‘The Drift: Surrealism, Situationism and Postsustainable Strategies of Gleaning’

Friday 27 November, 17.30-19.00, followed by reception
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R

Free Admission! All welcome!

Organised in association with the conference Surrealism, Post-War Theory and the Avant-Garde

Visual Culture Studies in Europe

Friday 5 February 2010, 10am
Room 2.05c, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7UW
Cost: £20/£10 concs.
Download a booking form here

Featuring Joachin Barriendos (Curator, Santa Monica Art Centre, Barcelona, Spain), Jose Luis Brea (Editor of Estudios Visuales, Madrid, Spain), Iain Chambers (University of Naples, Italy), Anna Maria Guasch (University of Barcelona, Spain), Oliver Grau (Danube University Krems, Austria), Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, England), Almira Ousmanova (European Humanities University Belarus/Lithuania), Kresimir Purgar (Center for Visual Studies Zagreb, Croatia), Vivian Rehberg (Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, France), Marquard Smith (University of Westminster, England), Oyvind Varges (University of Bergen, Norway), and Nina Lager Vestberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway). 

This conference is a collaboration between established and emerging scholars, curators, educators, and editors from across a number of European universities and cultural institutions with a commitment to Visual Culture Studies in Europe, and the study of visual culture. The event aims to:

•  Track the ongoing, uneven emergence in Europe of Visual Culture Studies as a field of inquiry across the Arts and Humanities.

•  Explore the ways in which these diverse trajectories in the emergence of the study of visual culture are historically and theoretically distinctive because of the unique characteristics of a specific country, location, language, peoples, their histories of migration, governmental policies, and the contexts within which universities function as sites for interdisciplinary learning.

• Interrogate some of the hazards of this distinctiveness – around, for instance, the hegemony of the Anglo-American, English as the lingua franca of the academic humanities, and questions of publishing and dissemination.

• Discuss how the advent of Visual Culture Studies, with its new ways of seeing, knowing, understanding, and participating might (1) extend our studies beyond the university (2) generate particular kinds of cultural practices, and (3) be itself responding to activities in anything from art and curating to policy making and industry initiatives.

Global Art in Barcelona

For our Catalan friends: David Cunningham will be representing the IMCC in Barcelona this week at the Catalan Association of Art Critics’ Fifth International Symposium on Art Criticism in a Global World. His opening address to the conference, entitled ‘Global Art/Global Modernities’, will be at 4.30pm on Friday 20 November at the MACBA Auditorium.

Further details here.

The Polytechnic blog

A new blog post on wind farms and peak oil, by the Institute’s resident environmental activist and ecological architect Jon Goodbun, is now up on the website of our friends The Polytechnic. Check it out here.

The future was history

Another Thursday night and another discussion of the Future at the David Roberts Art Foundation, with Sally O’Reilly, Uriel Orlow, Jon Cairns and, a late special guest passing through London from Yale, David Joselit. The next session takes place on a Saturday afternoon, on November 21st from 2pm, when the discussants will be academic Chris Horrocks, poet and music critic Ben Watson, and, from Chicago, Visiting Professor at the IMCC, Lennard J. Davis. See you there.

Several Interruptions

Thomson & Craighead’s new video work Several Interruptions is now available to watch online. It has been commissioned by the Arts Council of England especially for the re-branding of their new website. You can watch it online and read a short text about the work written by Sarah Cook here:

http://artscouncil.org.uk/our-work/several-interruptions/

Las Vegas and Freedom

Wednesday 11th November, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Adam Eldridge (Urban Development, University of Westminster)
‘Las Vegas and the Production of Freedom’

Free to all.

The Future as it happened

The first in the IMCC’s series of events on The Future at the David Roberts Art Foundation took place on November 5th, with talks on, among other topics, J.G. Ballard, imaging climate change, William Gibson and the 1956 This is Tomorrow exhibition leading to a vigorous discussion of science fiction and environmental politics. The next event is on November 12th, when susan pui san lok, Uriel Orlow, Sally O’Reilly and Niru Ratnam will debate whether ‘The Future is History’.

Six evenings of visual magic

Professor Pepper’s Ghost: Six Evenings of Visual Magic
The Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

A collaboration between the IMCC and the Magic Lantern Society, following on from a successful series of events in 2008, the old Polytechnic cinema at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street building, where the first ever motion picture was shown in the UK, will be hosting a series of six Thursday night lectures on pre-cinematic technologies of the visual.

All the talks start at 7pm, with doors open from 6pm, and are free of charge.

Thursday 12 November 2009
‘Professor’ Mervyn Heard, ‘Phantasmagoria-mania’

Thursday 26 November 2009
Simon Warner, ‘Lavater – The Shadow of History’

Thursday 10 December 2009
Dr Frank Gray, ‘Visualising the Marvellous: G.A. Smith and his film Santa Claus’

Thursday 28 January 2010
Paul Kieve, ‘Grappling with Ghosts: Staging Ghost Effects in the Modern Theatre’

Thursday 11 February 2010
Mark Butterworth, ‘Geared to the Stars: Victorian Astronomy through the Magic Lantern’

Thursday 25 February 2010
Stephen Herbert, ‘From Anorthoscope to Zoopraxiscope: An A-Z of Victorian Animated Cartoons’

Download the programme here.

Watch the Old Cinema slideshow on the BBC News website here.

Ezra Pound at the Polytechnic

Ezra Pound and Modern Criticism: 100 Years in London
Friday 4 December 2009, 9.30-5.00
Cayley Room (room 152), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Celebrating the centenary of Ezra Pound’s lectures on Romance literature at the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street, this one-day symposium, co-organised by the IMCC, brings together a range of speakers to discuss both Pound’s time in London and his contribution to modern literary criticism.

Speakers include: Massimo Bacigalupo (Genoa), Walter Bauman (Ulster), Rebecca Beasley (Oxford), Helen Carr (Goldsmiths), David Moody (York), Nick Selby (UEA)
Introduced by: David Cunningham and Leigh Wilson

FREE ADMISSION!

Interview with Nada Prlja

The Institute’s resident expert in activist art Stefan Szczelkun’s interview with Yugoslavian-born Nada Prlja is now up on the Metamute site. Read it here.

Surrealism, Post-War Theory and the Avant-Garde

SURREALISM, POST-WAR THEORY, AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Friday 27 – Saturday 28 November 2009

17.15 – 19.00, 27 November

10.00 – 18.30, 28 November (with registration from 9.30)

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Special Keynote Address: Professor Allan Stoekl (Penn State), ‘The Drift: Surrealism, Situationism and Postsustainable Strategies of Gleaning’

Friday 27 November, 17.30-19.00, followed by reception

Saturday Speakers: Lucy Bradnock (Getty Research Institute), David Cunningham (University of Westminster), Jonathan Eburne (Pennsylvania State University), Jill Fenton (Queen Mary, University of London), Patrick ffrench (Kings College, University of London), Steven Harris (University of Alberta, Edmonton), Alyce Mahon (Trinity College, Cambridge), Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Michael Richardson (independent scholar).

Ticket/entry details: £10. Please send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Coordinator, The Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, clearly stating that you wish to book for the ‘Surrealism, Post-War Theory and the Avant-Garde conference’. Or call 020 7848 2785/2909 to make a credit card booking. Or, for further information, send an email to ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk

Programme can be downloaded here.