'Regeneration': The Resurrection of Ruskin in Contemporary (Post-Postmodern?) Art

Last week, I attended back-to-back evening lectures that, unbeknownst to me, 'resurrected' the ghost of undergraduate-theses-past and, through it, brought a significant issue of current art making, display and study to the forefront of my attention.

Wednesday - Berrick Saul Auditorium and a talk on 'Ecological Aesthetics' by director of MIMA, Alistair Hudson.  Admittedly,  I knew neither what the terms 'Ecological Aesthetics' nor 'MIMA' implied, but, for that very reason, thought I should go.  This is truly one of the wonderful things about our department here at the University of York: the interests of faculty and students alike are so wide-ranging that amazingly diverse discussions await not only in every-day departmental exchanges but also in all the different speakers invited to give special lectures.  As PhD students intently (and intensely) focused on a sliver of research in a certain area, I believe the opportunity to hear something new and fresh and different is one of the great benefits of being at the University of York as a student of History of Art.  

Thursday - St. Chad's College Chapel, University of Durham and a 'college conversation' on 'Holiness, Regeneration and Beauty' featuring guest speaker and businessman, Jonathan Ruffer.  Never had I been to Durham and when fellow blogger and University of Durham alum Claudia  alerted me to the title of this talk, I could not miss the chance to not only see a new and highly acclaimed historic city, but also to hear anything to do with these three words - three words highly important to my study of nineteenth century debates on art and theology.

Durham by day...

Durham in the dark (ie...4pm!!). 

In talks that (a - I didn't know too too much about initially and (b - that at the outset seemed quite different, there was a strange, serendipitous sense of cohesion that ultimately wound itself back to an old 'friend' of mine: nineteenth century art and social theorist, Oxford Slade Lecturer, John Ruskin.

Author of celebrated books like Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, and The Two Paths (just to name a few...), John Ruskin wrote prolifically about the ancient ideals of societies and their art, their respective risings and fallings-out, and argued that they - art and social virtue - were integrally intertwined.  In an age of rapid industrial change,  Ruskin believed his times to be plunged into a darkness devoid of moral and true beauty.  He argued that his contemporaries must look to and resurrect the models of the past to make art usefully beautiful in the sense that it would inspire them to live and work and do good.  Pointing to and defending artists like J.M.W Turner and the emerging young Pre-Raphaelites as current examples of this ideal, he would continue to advocate for an art 'true to nature,' for guilds and learning and scientific enquiry, and a reverence for the craftsman, his love of intricacy, his skill.  As an undergraduate, I was inspired by his poetic love of art - through his (often lengthy, archetypal Victorian) descriptions, he merged language and image in a near seamless aesthetic expression, such that his text on art became a work of art itself.  Meshing media, meshing topics, I studied his equation of an ideal art with an ideal society with an ideal woman - what he would call a 'Queen of her Garden' or a 'Lily.'  His cohesion of purposeful, virtuous Art and purposeful, virtuous Womanhood I contrasted against Aesthetic 'Art for Art's sake' James McNeill Whistler's rather different equation of Art and Femininity - one sliver of their greater disagreement that would eventually, infamously bring them to court over libel.  Their dispute represented this broader contest within Victorian society where people struggled to find meaning for beauty and art, for themselves and their new lives in a mechanised, globally imperial world.

As Alistair Hudson would point out in his Wednesday night talk, many at the time thought Ruskin was mad - and actually, later in life, he went certifiably mad.  However, despite some of the tendencies in his writings that we see today as extraordinarily sexist and backwardly traditional, he was very very progressive - so radical as to be among the first to suggest that global warming and climate change was going to be an issue for our health and the health of nature.   It is with this eye that Hudson looks to and talked about John Ruskin in the discussion of his own museum's purpose in the industrial town of Middlesborough.  In moving art away from its autonomous reign in the museum, he is instead employing the museum, much as Ruskin would have sought to in his lectures on and about education, 'toward a lexicon of user-ship.'  By creating workshops and arranging galleries that stimulate use and interaction and engagement with art that itself is made purposefully to engage with its times and viewers, Hudsom aims to make not a neutral but an 'intersubjective interface' where the 'monolithic voice' of museums past is replaced by and encourages divergent opinion.  This way, he hopes people may not ask what art 'means' but how it is 'used' and through use, creates meaning for them in their lives, as individuals and a collective, involved, and opinionated whole. Hudson's stream of examples surprised me - their newness, freshness and contemporaneity made Ruskin, this figure of the past, a figure of my past even, so pertinent in the use of art today.  It is for this reason I had chosen to study the Victorians in general - I found their issues, their questions, so useful and present for today as we deal with change second-by-second in the digital world.  To see it actually discussed and begun to put into practice by a curator at a major modern art museum, though, struck me, made me return to my readings of Ruskin from years past....

The next night Ruskin reappeared! Like from an episode of Ghost Hunters, I was tempted to call out to the world of the spirits: 'Are you there? Can you give me a sign???'  (Fortunately, I restrained myself...)  In Durham, Jonathan Ruffer, surrounded by a host of St. Chad theologians, discussed his latest project at Bishop Auchland Castle, and the other such pursuits in the Yorkshire area to bring beauty and holiness to often downtrodden, industrial areas through the inspirational art of church heritage.  Ruffer, a very successful businessman, bought the ancient castle and has thus begun his attempt to restore it and bring it to public appreciation.  Humbly 'open to the will of God,' Ruffer desires not to patronisingly do things 'for people' but instead do things 'with people.' (A fascinating discussion on the use of prepositions in Scriptural events ensued...ask me another time...)  Again, Ruskin was mentioned explicitly as they discussed events in and around Bishop Auchland that sought to engage 'with' people, their faith, and their love of beauty and holy goodness in broader society.  I was absolutely stunned.  On the train back home from Durham, I thoughtfully pondered my own work with art.  How can I make my PhD work, however relatively much smaller than these grand projects at the regeneration of art and beauty, useful?  At this point, can it be? For beauty? For goodness? For grand old Victorian words like 'virtue' and 'society'?

Ruffer ended with an inspirational quote (paraphrasing from my notes of course) I think we should all keep in mind, in one form or another, when we are attempting to find meaning in our work, and in ourselves:  'If we bring nothing, God can do nothing.  If we bring even the smallest amount, the tiniest grain of sand, He works wonders.  Mathematically, God does not add.  He multiplies.'

So, with Ruskin, Hudson, and Ruffer in mind, we all should press on - PhD students, businessmen, and curators alike. Doing our best - making meaning through 'use.'  Because by doing nothing, we will achieve nothing; by doing some good, some good will be achieved.  We just might not see it yet!

Turner's Fighting Temeraire - an inspiration to Ruskin, an inspiration to end on here.  

The art historian who came in from the cold

Okay, the Cold War is over, the Berlin Wall has been commodified into tacky souvenir fragments of doubtful authenticity, and Checkpoint Charlie is now a great place for a photograph with your girlfriend. In the current vogue for “Ostalgie” precipitated by the 2003 film Goodbye Lenin!, I take a trip across East and West Berlin, starting wherelse but Alexanderplatz. Once a bleak void of Soviet urban planning, it is now cluttered with equally tasteless new commercial developments. Yet the Weltzeituhr and similarly futuristic Fernsehturm still stand as reminders of the 1960s DDR, as do a seated Marx and Engels by the Spree, installed exactly the same year as Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang. Lenin, however, has long said goodbye.

My visa expires at midnight, so I head back to Charlottenberg from Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn, past the lines of Red Army guards. I start the next day with West Berlin’s cultural showcase, the Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz. 

Past the Staatsbibliothek and Philharmonie, both built in the 1960s, to the Gemäldegalerie, a vast fine art collection brought back together in 1998 after Berlin’s reunification. Highlights include Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia, several Dürers and one of the best Rembrandt collections I have encountered anywhere. Moses with the Tablets of the Law, pictured, was especially admired by Sigmund Freud, who hung a reproduction in his Hampstead house.

Enough culture – now for some Currywurst! This dish was probably invented by occupying British soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It combines sausages, a German (and British) staple with a sauce made of ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and curry powder. Order yours “ohne darm”, without skin, with chips or a bread roll. Curry 36 is one of the oldest in Berlin, located in Kreuzberg by Mehringdamm U-Bahn.

Next, a nice jolly down the Unter den Linden, possibly Berlin’s most elegant thoroughfare, towards the Brandenburg Gate and Norman Foster’s Reichstag, Donald Trump protest permitting. 

A day of non-stop walking requires some relaxation, and where better than the Stadtbad Neukölln? Built in 1914, this Roman-style public bathhouse has giant order columns to spare, reminding you of what civic architecture used to mean. Somewhat off the tourist circuit, its generous spa facilities are good value and well worth a visit.

The Neukölln district, the inspiration behind a track on David Bowie’s Heroes album of 1977, has a large Turkish immigrant population. Kreuzberg is said to be the birthplace of the Döner kebab, and any excuse for one is a good excuse!

After a visit to the Schloss Charlottenberg, much of which is under construction, and a lunch of Berliner Eisbein (boiled ham hock with pease pudding, mashed potato and Sauerkraut), I dress for the opera, namely Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at the Deutsche Oper with star tenor Juan Diego Florez as Raoul. A five-hour extravaganza loosely based on the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it is often discussed – usually disparagingly – but rarely heard. Compared perhaps to Rossini’s William Tell or Verdi’s Don Carlo it is somewhat banal, yet as spectacular theatre it remains a benchmark. Numerous airs from it stand the test of time, not least “Plus blanche que la blanche Hermine”, “Piff Paff” and “Nobles seigneurs, salut!”.

Before I head back to the airport there is still time to visit the Museuminsel, or what remains that isn’t under construction. The Pergamum Museum with its dazzlingly coloured Ishtar Gate, transported brick by brick from the site of Nebuchadnezzar II’s palace in Babylon, is a must. I then climb the Berliner Dom for the best views of the city.

To quote Boris Johnson on a recent official visit, “Ich bin nicht ein Berliner” (which should have been kein) – to which I add, “bis bald”!

Archival Adventures: Oh, the places you will go...

Archival work is among my favourite parts of research as a graduate student.  After spending long hours labouring over your texts in the library, the proximity of your materials, directly in your hands, will never cease to excite and refresh your research venture.  Along with conference presentations, it is also one of those activities that can take you incredible places in the world. (Read about fellow blogger Adam's recent trip here.)   As I expand my materials in the doctorate, my 'to-go' list is growing as I add more and more cathedrals and galleries to the archival 'haunts' of years past. 

Although I am only in my first term of my long venture, I was eager to return to the drawings, designs and sketchbooks that feature centrally in my thesis.  Train tickets ordered, bags packed and pencils sharpened, I returned to my quest for Burne-Jones material and any adventure that might ensue!    

In my happy place...

Last month I took an extended 'southern tour' through the endless abundance of London and Oxford. The trip to the Victoria&Albert Museum Prints and Drawings Room is always memorable - not only do they possess significant Burne-Jones sketchbooks for my work, but a visit includes a winding (unofficial) 'tour' through all the 'behind-the-scenes' workings of the massive museum since the traditional entry to the prints and drawings room is under construction. I will never cease to peek in the bulging cabinets and shelves in this backstage world where unseen treasures are secreted away for future organisation and use. 

Oxford is always a joy to return to: it's great 'dreaming spires' guard the infinite books and scholarship entrusted to it over the centuries.  I never was able to see all the libraries during my 9-month Masters there, but the old Bodleian, aromatic, ambient and medieval, is a humbling enough experience for any devout lover of the book.  

   

Excited to begin my day of work with books in the beautiful Oxford Radcliffe Camera.

For my archival research, I venture over to the Ashmolean Museum, the oldest public museum in the world.  

Here I spread out and settle in: I find the Ashmolean Print Room to be among the friendliest and most resourceful archives I have been to thus far.  They actually possess the largest collection of Raphael drawings in the world, and most amazingly, are open to the public! (Appointments recommended.) 

Burne-Jones Orpheus designs for the Graham Piano. His delicacy of touch is incredible - something to truly see in person.

 And research is always fun whenever the subject of my study, Burne-Jones, is involved. Despite the 'melancholy' of many of his monumental works, the abundant caricatures in archives across England show his other side and never cease to make me laugh...

And, at the end of the day, a pint is the most appropriate way to celebrate the success of your research 'quest!'

GUEST POST! PhDs and Student Life: A Tricky Prospect

Maddie Boden talks sports teams, societies, colleges and much more...

Staying in York for my entire academic career thus far has been an effective way to develop some pretty deep social bonds. As an undergraduate, I was able to try out different societies and sports teams, learn about the collegiate system firsthand by living within it and get involved with the students’ union (YUSU) who reached out to me as an undergraduate often and effectively. Moving towards postgraduate study, I was well aware of the Graduate Student Association (GSA) and what they did and felt comfortable getting involved from the start. Six years on and I’m starting to feel like a piece of the furniture. However, I know that coming to York for the first time and as a PhD student is a completely different prospect. Not only are you thrown in headfirst to a new academic community, but that community isn’t really geared towards you as a: mature (21+ years plus is really not that old), humanities based (ever notice how *all* the science PhDs have their own office?), and new student at York.

Well I come to you now, seven weeks into term, hoping to offer up some of the wisdom that comes with staying in the same damn place for this long. There are a huge number of ways of being involved as a PhD student in life on campus - societies, teams, events and campaigns. They aren’t often marketed as being particularly postgrad friendly, but I’ve been here long enough to know that they are and they benefit from postgraduates being involved. I also work at the students’ union part-time which helps to keep track of new activities and events that are going on. I’ll proceed in listicle form for ease of reading.

1.       Sports Teams

York Sport has made getting involved as a postgraduate really approachable and easy. Teams now offer ‘taster’ sessions for recreational players with no commitment to joining. According to the York Sport President, Isaac Beevor, here are the teams that currently have the highest number of postgraduate players:

            1. Volleyball

            2. Archery

            3. Ultimate Frisbee

            4. Handball

You can more information about these teams (and the 60+ others York Sport Union offer) and details about their upcoming sessions at http://www.yusu.org/opportunities/sport/clubs-a-z

2. Art Society

While Art History Society tends to err towards night’s out for undergraduates and SHADY offers intermittent activities, the Art Society is offering a unique opportunity to art historians who might also be artists! The Wentworth Art Studios on campus are being refurbished and reopened at the start of next term and Art Society is offering memberships for access to the studios (which includes time in the studio and supplies) The studios have space for painting, drawing, ceramics, and print-making. If you follow this link: http://www.yusu.org/blogs/view/2005/art-studio-keep-me-updated

you can sign up to the Art Studio mailing list where more information will be circulated when the studios reopen next term.

3. Colleges

One of York’s founding principles was being part of a collegiate system, akin to Oxford and Cambridge but with more opportunities for students to have a say in college life. Today, York has 9 colleges (with a further two planned in the next 5 years). Every single student is assigned to a college at York, including PhDs. The default postgraduate college is Wentworth, but there are postgraduates in every single college and you can opt to be in any college you like. Some postgraduates are college welfare tutors, who live and work in a college, providing a friendly face and first point of contact for other students. College tutors also receive subsidised on-campus accommodation. Another way postgraduates can get involved in colleges is through the colleges junior common room committees (JCRC) JCRC are made up of a number of students who work on events, campaigns and improving student life. There are postgraduate and mature student roles on every single college committee that often go unfilled because postgraduates remain outside the college ‘bubble’. A great way to make a start to change this is by getting involved. College JCRC elections have just been and gone, but colleges will be running by-elections to fill empty positions early next term.

4. Give It A Go Trips

Give It A Go is a programme set up by YUSU to engage certain communities of students (postgraduates in particular) in getting more involved in student life. Feedback has shown that postgraduates that try one of the Give It A Go sessions were glad that they did and said they would do it again and recommend it to a friend. One of the most popular Give It A Go programmes are the termly trips they offer.

On Saturday 26 November they are running a trip to the Manchester Christmas Markets. For £12 (much cheaper than a train ticket) there is a coach taking students there for the day to explore the markets. You can buy a ticket for the coach at www.yusu.org/tickets

You can also pick up a Give It A Go booklet at the Student Centre to learn about the other sorts of sessions they offer (societies, sports clubs, volunteering, careers). 

Many thanks to Maddie Boden, our SHADY co-ordinator, for contributing to our blog this week.. Look out for more guest posts in the coming months...

The Aesthetica Short Film Festival: Inside Out, Outside in

This past weekend, a buzz of film fans in yellow badges dashed from place to place around York for the Aesthica Short Film Festival. As a nineteenth century art historian, I have only really examined film and its art in a brief undergraduate course, but as simply a lover of art, I was eager to be visually stimulated and challenged with the some of the 400 short films over the course of four days.  From 'experimental' to 'drama' to 'documentary' and 'family friendly,' there was literally a category for anyone of any age and any interest.  I was not to be disappointed.

Screening at the National Centre for Early Music - right around the corner from me! Never would have known...

In a range of beautiful venues across York - many of which I had yet even to know existed! - back-to-back sessions were screened from morn onto late into the night.  In the flurry of options, I chose sessions largely entitled 'Experimental' and 'Artist's film' or 'Dance,' 'Music,' and 'Fashion.'  These categorisations seemed by no means ultra-restrictive, as I myself questioned what explicitly determined 'Experimental' from 'Artist's film' and saw the heavy reliance of dance upon music and fashion and vice versa.  Their interrelationships, especially in a direct comparison between sessions like this, usefully illuminated for me one of the wonders of films: its extraordinary flexibility that, at times, challenges, subverts and therefore underlines our habitual attempts to structure, organise and (oftentimes) fully understand art itself.

It was this understanding of 'understanding' itself that was repeatedly impressed upon me as viewer. These issues converged in a variety of ways in an amazing set of Artists's Films, that as a collective, stand out in my memory.  On the one hand, many of the videos could prompt the viewer to think about our existence within a multitude, presenting us with the temporality and smallness of our existence within the collective architectures of our society.  In films like Theo Tagholm's Simulacra, the buildings and structures of our very lives were blown-up, fragmented, and examined, picked through what, in some cases, ended up looking like the great rubbish heap of humanity. This feeling was explored in a different was by other films, which explored our subjective interior loneliness, digging sometimes quite literally beneath our relationships, our clothes and skin.  Notions of beauty, gender, and reality itself were slowly, and many times, uncomfortably stripped away to lay bare deep emotional and physical fears.  Text on the screen, the spoken word, and music often underlined visuals that equated eerily open landscapes or unidentified fleshy surfaces with our bodies.  The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes and Groves was no traditional 'guide' in the sense of documentation or education; rather, I felt myself asking, what are we learning about ourselves? The music, the angles, the lighting, could all make nature feel both more and less alien to us.  The strings, playing against the gurgling murmur of the waterbed, sometimes gave me a sense of peace, but at other times made me incredibly uneasy.  Do we therefore become anxious outsiders, glimpsing and probing into secret grottoes' shadows, and aware of own 'looking' as potentially sinister and forbidden?  In Aya Ben Ron's short entitled No Body, a deep resonant voice made the viewer feel the fear of loss of your own body -  words like 'itch,' repeated and associated with the 'ants' that were crawling on and inside your skin, your 'stomach', made me squirm in my chair.  Furthermore, by converging reality and fantasy with the opening lines 'based on a true story and a fairy tale,' I altogether began to wonder, are we on the inside or on the outside of the story, the characters, the film, and our very selves?  In these and other instances, I felt that the insides were pushed out, and outsides were pulled in, fluidly breaking boundaries in beautiful and ugly, serene and uncomfortable ways.

My favourite film, if I were to select one, was Maryam Tagakory's Poem and Stone, where 'residual soil and stains aren't mere reconstructions of the past, but an attempt to ritualise the fragments of the absent' (ASFF Official Programme, 87).  Iranian street scenes were played against the bare feet, the bare fingers, that formed a lump of fallen soil into a beautiful circular arrangement of words - poetry, textually and visually.  Colours, music, words were all coordinated into a sublimely sombre aesthetic experience that played shadows of past memory against collages of the present. Even days later, shadows of this film play in my own memory, reenacting and yet inevitably separating me from those ritualised fragmentations of pasts, presents, and absences in Iran.  Thus, even here, I am aware of my bodily distance from and emotional connection to that which was presented on the screen - a paradox that a film like this can make so profoundly apparent to its public.  


In the end, I was taken not only to new places in York (who knew the National Centre for Early Music was less than a minute's walk from my accommodation?!), but new places geographically, ideologically and artistically.  I am already excited for next year's addition, and I highly recommend it to anyone, especially my fellow departmental students here at York.  It is an amazing opportunity to see and think about the ever-present issues, wonders and mysteries in art that is not to be passed up next year!