Tate Papers: Art theory

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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

SEBASTIANO BARASSI	Sebastiano Barassi: The Modern Cult of Replicas: A Rieglian Analysis of Values in Replication
	Although it was written over a century ago, Alois Riegl’s ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’ still provides a valid analytical framework for the study of key theoretical issues surrounding the transmission to the future of works of art. Given their age, some of the broader philosophical principles underlying the text may appear outdated (for example, Riegl’s evolutionism and his theory of Kunstwollen, the notion of art specific to each period in history).
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

HARRY COOPER	Thoughts on Thoughts on Replication
	As Sebastiano Barassi and Yve-Alain Bois point out in their contributions to this symposium, Alois Riegl’s essay ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’, 1903, offers a useful set of co-ordinates for thinking about the Tate’s Gabo project, both because Riegl is explicitly addressing the problem of restoration and because, rather than advocating one attitude or another, he offers a taxonomy of possible positions.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

ANNA DEZEUZE	Blurring the Boundaries between Art and Life
	The desire to blur the boundaries between art and life was shared by a great number of artists working across the world in the 1960s. One of the most radical forms to emerge from this shared concern was a type of art that emphasised the lived experience of its viewers by requiring them to adopt new forms of active participation.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

MATTHEW GALE	Amazement and Uneasiness: Early Thoughts
	Soon after the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, a fragment broke off a work by Naum Gabo, Spiral Theme, 1941, in one of our displays. Though this has yet to unleash terror, it was, as far as I was concerned, a spontaneous and unexpected action certainly raising amazement and unease. However, from talking with colleagues in conservation, it appeared that the various plastics of which the sculpture is composed were pulling against each other, and the most fragile gave way.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

MARGARET IVERSEN	Resistance to Replication
	For the past several decades art theorists have been wrestling with the consequences of fine art’s accelerated absorption into technologies of reproduction. Following Walter Benjamin’s qualified embrace of this situation in 1936, some have greeted technical replication as the final deliverance of art from outmoded notions of authorship, originality and uniqueness. The more democratic dissemination possible with photography, film and video positioned them as the contemporary artistic media.
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

CHRISTINA LODDER	Naum Gabo and the Quandaries of the Replica
	For Naum Gabo, the issue of making replicas, copies, and reconstructions emerged with some force during his lifetime. Like many of the sculptors working in Russia during the revolutionary period, he was sometimes forced to execute his ideas in poor-quality materials, and works frequently became lost or damaged through the upheavals of the time. His colleagues, such as Vladimir Tatlin, who remained in Russia, tended to move into design...
	Autumn 2007	View Paper

ALISTAIR RIDER	Carl Andre
	I am currently in the midst of writing a book on Carl Andre’s poems and sculptures, so when I read through the list of issues the Steering Committee outlined for discussion, my mind immediately turned to the occasions when Andre has chastised museums for installing replicas, or ‘forgeries’ of his works. What light do these episodes throw on the larger debates surrounding replication?
	Autumn 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

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

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