Location, Memory and the Visual Research Group
Symposium Two - Wednesday 21 January 2004
Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road, Manchester
- Louise Purbrick - Photography versus History: recording the H blocks of the Maze/Long Kesh
A row of British Army watchtowers positioned along a stretch of the seventeen-foot concrete perimeter wall of Long Kesh/Maze prison are still visible from the M1, the Belfast-Dublin motorway. The prison, however, is closed. The last prisoners to qualify for early release under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement left on 28th July 2000 and the process of shutting down began. While the prison was empty but not yet closed, Magnum photographer Donovan Wylie took a series of 800 photographs, 100 of which will be published in a book in March 2004. The book includes an architectural history that I put together. My paper explores and reflects upon these process of recording a site of conflict, often referred to as a 'symbol' or 'microcosm' of 'the Troubles.' It was the place where those convicted of 'scheduled' or 'terrorist-type' offences under the 1973 Emergency Powers Act won recognition as political prisoners following hunger strikes by republican prisoners in 1980 and 1981.
Dr Louise Purbrick is a Senior Lecturer in Art and Design History at the University of Brighton. She has published work on nineteenth and twentieth century material and visual culture in the Journal of Design History as well as Oxford Art Journal and is editor of The Great Exhibition of 1851 (Manchester University Press, 2001). In 2001, she wrote an article for the Museums Journal that debated and advocated the partial preservation of Long Kesh/Maze as a historic site or museum.
- Dave Beech - Hospitality: the gallery, the gaze and the politics of social space
The simplistic notion that galleries are merely the receptacles of art and the locations where visitors encounter art has been swept away by the various branches of institutional critique. For this paper I want to extend the insight – in the writing, indebted to Foucault, of Carol Duncan, Tony Bennett et al – that galleries are, among other things, machines for producing art’s spectators.
Culture, history and location are inscribed in vision. This is what we call the gaze: the socially produced ‘look’ or ocular regime. If the gaze implies that there are pre-existing modes of vision through which the individual ‘sees’ in a given context, then the gallery is a lens through which we ‘see’ art. There is a growing industry devoted to studying what sort of lens a gallery is and what sort of ocular regimes it produces. I want to approach the question of the gallery’s production of art’s spectator differently.
How is the passer-by transformed into the spectator of art? In order to approach this question we must dispense with the old formula that art spectators are predisposed to the viewing of art (either by virtue of their sensitivities or their class) as well as the structuralist argument that the gallery confers value onto the objects and individuals that it houses. The passer-by is not transformed into a spectator of art once and for all but, like the stranger transformed into a guest, the transformation may be temporary and partial or cynical and deceptive. Galleries are not stable enough to do anything but offer short-lived tenancies to objects, individuals and ideas; galleries are not the homes of art, they are its hotels. I want to look at art’s specific forms of hospitality and the conditions it places on visitors through that hospitality. Looking at what ocular regimes the gallery welcomes is the first step in thinking about who are art’s unwelcome guests.
Dave Beech is an artist, critic, curator and lecturer who was a prominent member of the young London art scene in the years following the yBa explosion. He worked closely with BANK in seminal exhibitions such as Zombie Golf, Cocaine Orgasm, BANKTV and Dog-u-mental. His work has been exhibited widely across Europe and the USA, including Tate Modern (in Century City). He contributed to the Matthew Higgs’ Bookworks project “Seven Wonders of the World”, Kenny Schachter’s conTEMPorary Gallery, New York, as well as Gavin Wade’s “STRIKE” exhibition. His most recent exhibitions include text works for John Russell’s publication, “Frozen Tears”, “strolling into history” for Artranspennine03 and he has recorded 19 songs for “Radio Radio” at International 3. He is a regular writer for Art Monthly and other art magazines such as Untitled and Mute, and has contributed to several books, including the recent Verso anthology dedicated to his writing with John Roberts and selected responses “The Philistine Contoversy”. He has written a chapter on Leonard Cohen’s song “I’m Your Man” for the forthcoming anthology “Pop Fictions”, a book about songs in the movies. He convened a session for the Association of Art Historian’s Conference, under the heading “Political Art Now” which was published as a special issue of Third Text. He is currently the Subject Leader of Fine Art as Social Practice at the University of Wolverhampton after having taught on the MA Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Art. And is a Director of FLOATING IP gallery, Manchester.
- Carey Young - The Innovation Room
Carey Young (*1970) is an artist based in London. She grew up in Manchester and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1997. She works across a variety of media including video, performance, digital media and sculpture, often using the form of a participative system or process. Her recent works explore the increasing incorporation of the personal and public into the realm of the commercial, particularly in the light of the insidious 'soft structures' of contemporary Capitalism. Young's projects deliberately and provocatively take an ambiguous political stance in order to create a web of complex associations and questions for the viewer, rather than an easily-defined position. Within her talk, Young will discuss Joseph Beuys' utopian notion of social sculpture - that 'everyone is an artist' - in the light of the corporate avant-garde's obsession with creative innovation, vision and 'revolutionary' language.
Young has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows at venues including the Whitechapel Gallery (London), the ICA, (London), and the Munich Kunstverein, and she has given recent lectures on her work at Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The monograph, 'Carey Young, Incorporated' was published by Film & Video Umbrella in 2002.