Tate Papers: Artist

All Papers

ART & LANGUAGE	On Painting
	This paper was presented by members of Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison and Mel Ramsden) at Tate Modern in March 2003 as part of the talks series Painting Present. It argues that painting resists the Institutional Theory of art in as much as it does not depend on institutions for its status as art. In this respect, painting after conceptual art may be seen as just as critical of art institutions as conceptual art used to be.
	Spring 2004	View Paper

JAMES ATTLEE	Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark And Le Corbusier
	Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78), who trained originally as an architect, is best known for his spectacular ‘building cuts’. These have often been seen as an outright rejection of the architectural profession. The collaborative project Anarchitecture (1974), however, demonstrates how the language of modernism, particularly the polemical and epigrammatic Towards a New Architecture by the French modernist artist and architect Le Corbusier, was very much part of his raw material.
	Spring 2007	View Paper

RACHEL BARKER AND ALISON BRACKER	Beuys is Dead: Long Live Beuys! Characterising Volition, Longevity, and Decision-Making in the Work of Joseph Beuys
	Joseph Beuys' use of unconventional materials, such as felt, wax, and fat, characterise his artworks. Whilst museums strive to obtain artists' instructions regarding their objects' life-span and care, Beuys' preferences were largely unrecorded or inconsistent. The three case studies of Beuys works presented here explore museum decision-making when confronted with unclear artist attitudes to conservation intervention, and objects evincing material and conceptual decay.
	Autumn 2005	View Paper

TANYA BARSON	'Unland'. The Place of Testimony
	Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (born 1958) addresses the themes of loss and bereavement in her sculpture Unland: audible in the mouth, 1998. Focusing on this work in Tate's collection, the paper looks at the position of witnesses to violent events and how their testimonies are translated by Salcedo into the formal language of sculpture.
	Spring 2004	View Paper

VICTOR BURGIN	The Separateness of Things
	In 1986 Victor Burgin made a series of photographic works based on Edward Hopper's painting Office at Night (1940) featuring a female secretary and male boss. In this paper, which is based on a talk given at Tate Modern in 2004 at the time of a major Hopper exhibition, Burgin described the relationship of his own works to Hopper's painting, exploring the sexual codes implicit in both.
	Spring 2005	View Paper

OLIVIER CHOW

Alfredo Jaar and the Post-Traumatic Gaze

This paper discusses the relation between trauma and representation in the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar (born 1956), focusing mainly on his installations dedicated to Africa, in particular Sudan and Rwanda. It will be argued that the artist toys with the mechanisms of trauma, reprogramming the shock dynamics of trauma and substituting the aesthetics of the wound with the ‘document’, which contextualises and integrates image and event beyond and against the politics of global information.

Spring 2008

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LYNNE COOKE	Richard Serra: A Case Study
	A close inspection of Richard Serra�s sculptural oeuvre, based on consultation with the artist himself, reveals that issues relating to replicas and reproductions have relatively little applicability for his practice. While Serra�s sculpture has ranged widely in form over the past forty years, it can nonetheless be loosely subdivided into four principal groupings, each determined by the materials employed.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

NATASHA DUFF	Constable's Sketch for Hadleigh Castle: A Technical Examination
	Constable (1776-1837) made one of his characteristic 'six footer' oil sketches in preparation for Hadleigh Castle which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1829. The sketch has strips of canvas added at left and lower edges, the attribution of which has long been a subject of debate. A fresh technical study re-examines the evidence surrounding these compositional alterations.
	Spring 2006	View Paper

KRZYSZTOF FIJAŁKOWSKI	Emila Medková: The Magic of Despair
	The work of Emila Medková (1928-1985) is a remarkable example of surrealist documentary photography. A central member of the post-war Czech surrealist group, her images focus on the 'concrete irrationality' of the urban environment, finding metaphors in the world of objects and spaces for the absurd and oppressive state of post-war central Europe.
	Autumn 2005	View Paper

KAREN HEARN	Sir Anthony van Dyck's Portraits of Sir William and Lady Killigrew, 1638
	This paper discusses the painting of the courtier and writer Sir William Killigrew and the companion portrait of his wife Mary Hill, Lady Killigrew, both painted in 1638, by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). The pair were acquired by Tate in 2002 and 2003 from two entirely different sources.
	Spring 2004	View Paper

MARK GODFREY and ANTHONY McCALL	Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone
	In the late 1960s, a number of artists who had trained as sculptors, and whose most well known work was sculpture, started working with film (Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson). Around the same time, independent film makers who did not necessarily identify themselves as ‘artists’ began to consider the sculptural dimensions of film – paying attention not just to the images that they presented on the screen...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

STEVEN HARRIS	'Pataphysical Graham': A Consideration of the Pataphysical Dimension of the Artistic Practice of Rodney Graham
	‘Pataphysical Graham’ investigates the possible use of pataphysical motifs in the work of the contemporary Canadian artist Rodney Graham, through his recourse to the figures of the clinamen and the spiral, two key motifs in ’pataphysics. The discussion is keyed to issues of melancholy and utopia, as these recur in Graham’s work.
	Autumn 2006	View Paper

YSANNE HOLT	‘The Veriest Poem of Art in Nature’: E. A. Hornel’s Japanese Garden in the Scottish Borders
	E. A. Hornel (1864-1933) depicted Galloway girls in decorative, idyllic natural settings. From 1900 he also designed a small Japanese garden at Broughton House in the Borders town of Kirkcudbright. Hornel's garden combines standard features of Japonaiserie with a few symbols of ‘Scottishness’ - local stones and relics. So how might we interpret references to idealised Japanese and Scottish aesthetic and cultural traditions in both paintings and garden?
	Autumn 2004	View Paper

KIERAN LYONS	Military Avoidance: Marcel Duchamp and the 'Jura-Paris Road'
	The essay traces military relationships in the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), paying particular attention to his notes of 1912 known as the 'Jura-Paris Road'. These are interpreted as 'military texts' and the author shows how military concerns remained with Duchamp throughout his career, resulting in facetious outcomes that obscured uneasy preoccupations.
	Spring 2006	View Paper

NICOLA MOORBY	'Poor abraded butterflies of the stage': Sickert and the Brighton Pierrots
	Sickert's interest in popular entertainment extended beyond the London music-hall and his 1915 painting Brighton Pierrots depicts a troupe of vaudeville performers on the beach at Brighton. This paper explores the social-historical context of seaside Pierrot groups in England and the related European traditions of the Commedia dell'Arte and French pantomime.
	Spring 2006	View Paper

JENNIFER MUNDY	An 'overflowing, a richness & poetry': Joseph Cornell's Planet Set and Giuditta Pasta
	The American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) is famous for his allusive box constructions. This paper examines the history of Planet Set, 1950, a work in Tate's collection that has received little critical commentary. In particular, it explores Cornell's fascination with the early nineteenth-century opera singer Giuditta Pasta, and shows how this relates to a number of other themes in his work, including stars, maps and birds.
	Spring 2004	View Paper

JENNIFER MUNDY

The Very Late Style of Hans Hartung

Hans Hartung (1904–89) suffered a major stroke in 1986 and was wheelchair-bound for his remaining years. Yet in theis period he produced an astonishing number of large and energetically painted canvases. Some people speculated that the paintings must have been produced by his team of studio assistants. This paper examines the relationship of Hartung and his assistants in his last years in order to explore the role played by the artist as author of his late works.

Spring 2008

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MARTIN MYRONE	Gothic Romance and the Quixotic Hero: A Pageant for Henry Fuseli in 1783
	Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) was one of the most inventive artists of his age, exploring the strange and fantastic in a way that anticipates modern horror. By focusing on a pageant held in his honour, this essay interprets Fuseli's work in relation to the wider culture of the Gothic and the historical trauma of the American Revolution.
	Spring 2004	View Paper

MARTIN POSTLE	Thomas Gainsborough's 'Lost' Portrait of Auguste Vestris
	The subject of this paper is a portrait of the celebrated eighteenth-century dancer, Auguste Vestris, acquired by Tate in 1955, when it was attributed to Gainsborough Dupont, nephew of Thomas Gainsborough. The paper argues that the portrait is in fact by Gainsborough himself and, through a discussion of the context in which it was made, sheds new light on Gainsborough's close relations with the world of the London stage.
	Autumn 2005	View Paper

SEAN RAINBIRD	'Are We as a Society Going to Carry on Treating People This Way?' Michael Landy's Scrapheap Services
	During the 1990s Michael Landy made four major installations, including Scrapheap Services, 1995. Although motivated by personal concerns, these installations caught the mood of social change, labour market reforms and political ideology at the tail-end of the Thatcher era in Britain. All this had a profound impact on the emerging, metropolitan art scene of the time, soon to be labelled 'young British art'.
	Spring 2004	View Paper

ANNABEL RUTHERFORD	A Dramatic Reading of Augustus Leopold Egg’s Untitled Triptych
	This article explores the significance of the theatrical and literary references found in the triptych Past and Present (1858) by the British nineteenth-century painter Augustus Leopold Egg. On the surface the work appears to be a warning against the perils of adultery, but analysis of the three paintings’ theatrical and literary references suggests a possible alternative reading involving a condemnation of loveless marriages.
	Spring 2007	View Paper

JEFFREY SALETNIK	Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, and the Imperative of Teaching
	This paper examines affinities between the Bauhaus-indebted instructional methods and practices of Josef Albers and the sculpture of Eva Hesse, his student at Yale University. The author argues that pedagogy affects artistic practice, or that the means or process through which artists are educated contributes to how they approach their work.
	Spring 2007	View Paper

RICHARD SHIFF	Judd through Oldenburg
	In his critical writing on Claes Oldenburg during the 1960s Donald Judd explained how emotional content might be conveyed through representational imagery, without the emotion depending on either the identity of the represented object or the subjective mood of the artist. Such art was neither representational, nor abstract, nor expressive in the usual understanding of these general terms. To establish the specificity of his position - through Oldenburg - Judd resorted to catachresis and syllepsis, rhetorical devices that operate where more familiar language fails.
	Autumn 2004	View Paper

CHRISTOPHER SHORT	Between text and Image in Kandinsky's Oeuvre: A Consideration of the Album Sounds
	Focusing on the album of poetry and woodcuts called Sounds (Klänge), published c.1912, this paper examines how Kandinsky understood and exploited the relationship between text and image. It shows how he conceived of the album as an example of synthetic art and explores the broader principles underlying his idea of artistic synthesis.
	Autumn 2006	View Paper

SAM SMILES	Thomas Guest and Paul Nash in Wiltshire: Two Episodes in the Artistic Approach to British Antiquity
	The artistic representation of British antiquity brings in its wake a problem of methodology: how are the working assumptions of artists and archaeologists to be reconciled? This paper looks at two examples of artists responding to the deep past, both concerned with sites in Wiltshire. Thomas Guest (1754-1818) painted the grave goods from two barrows at Winterslow excavated in the 1810s. His paintings survived and were rediscovered in the mid-1930s. In that same decade the British artist Paul Nash encountered Avebury for the first time and responded to the prehistoric site in his own terms. The paper considers the two approaches and what they may tell us about the relationship between art and archaeology.
	Spring 2005	View Paper

LUKE SKREBOWSKI	All Systems Go: Recovering Jack Burnham’s ‘Systems Aesthetics’
	Jack Burnham’s systems aesthetics was one of the first, fully developed, critical theories of postformalist artistic practice. Yet Burnham, undeservedly, is little known today. Recovering, reprising and reassessing his work produces a richer reading of art production c.1970. It also suggests an alternative genealogy of contemporary practice.
	Spring 2006	View Paper

SIMON STARLING	Replication: Some Thoughts, Some Works
	The following illustrated texts flag up a number of works from the last ten years, some of which are still in production, that take as their starting point existing objects or artworks and deploy processes of reproduction or replication as an investigative tool. All of these projects engage (to a greater or lesser extent) in, and have been generated through a close collaboration with, the mechanisms and culture of the museum.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

BLAKE STIMSON	The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher
	Bernd and Bernd and Hilla Becher first began their project of systematically photographing industrial structures in the late 1950s. This paper, first given at a conference at Tate Modern, investigates the rhythmic continuity of the comportment or bearing toward the world that they have made into an epic form and that has gained broader influence in the work of their successful students.
	Spring 2004	View Paper

BRANDON TAYLOR	Kandinsky and Contemporary Painting
	The author assesses the reach of Kandinsky’s early painting, first reflecting upon the sense of scale and time in Kandinsky’s art, then his clash with the Constructivists and his emergence in New York in the 1940s as a ‘painterly’ European artist of significance. The paper finally dwells upon the nature of complexity in today’s painting, and its connections with Kandinsky across a century of change.
	Autumn 2006	View Paper

PAUL THIRKELL	From the Green Box to Typo/Topography: Duchamp and Hamilton's Dialogue in Print
	This paper examines Marcel Duchamp's use of the collotype printing process for publishing the contents of his Green Box and Bo�te-en-valise in the 1930s. It subsequently traces the linguistic and graphic interpretations of this work by the British artist Richard Hamilton in his 1960 The Green Book and in his recent fusion of this work with the 'topography' of the Large Glass in the print Typo/Topography, published in 2003.
	Spring 2005	View Paper

TOBY TREVES	Kenneth Armitage’s Pandarus (version 8)
	This paper concentrates on the making and meaning of Kenneth Armitage Pandarus (version 8) 1963, which was recently presented to Tate in 2003 by the Patrons of British Art. Special attention is given to the humanist content of Armitage’s oeuvre and how this was interpreted by critics in the 1950s and 1960s. Pandarus (version 8) is considered in the context of the cultural and social changes of the early 1960s and the rise of the New Generation sculptors. The central proposition is that despite the critical hostility that this work and others like it met, it is in fact closely attuned to the wider social concerns of the period.
	Autumn 2004	View Paper

IAN WALKER	The 'Comic Sublime': Eileen Agar at Ploumanac'h
	In 1936 the English surrealist Eileen Agar photographed the extraordinary rock formations at Ploumanac'h in Brittany. This paper examines the ambiguous status of the photographs, using research in Tate Archives and at Ploumanac'h itself to provide new insights into Agar's images.
	Autumn 2005	View Paper

STURTEVANT	Inherent Vice or Vice Versa
	There is the inside and the outside. There is the interior and exterior. Not as in the Foucault fold, but as in essence, force and potency: the interior silent power of art. And it is here that hovers
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

DIDIER VERMEIREN	Je Travaille sur la Présence
	How and why I became a sculptor is not of much interest. No one looking at my work will find me in it. I have nothing to say, I have no story to tell – at least not within the means of sculpture. What happens in the studio is not all that spectacular. You have no choice when it comes to actually making the works. Everything is decided in advance. The only thing you can observe in the studio is the production of the sculpture.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper