Christine Bruce: Plan of Research and BoW

I want to explore collection as art practice, within the context of personal history, and explore how art, as an interdisciplinary, poetic practice, can create a space in which objects resonate in ways that go beyond their subject-context. I will relate this to the ideas of the poetic image in Gaston Bachelard’s the poetics of space, in which he postulates a phenomenological status for the products of the imagination.

The area for exploration is one of objects and collections, and spaces that house collections, and how artists use collections as images, in the Bachelardian sense. In my own work, I am interested in the collections as in the junk shop, the memorabilia by which people’s pasts are inscribed, but which have pathos from being removed from their original context. In this case, their phenomenological status is tragic: they speak of loss, of displacement, of the body ripped from the soul, the tragedy of the material.

My BoW involves images of objects which are performative- they tell, they enfold, they hide, they provide a geography, they form a network of associations, they speak of the past, or they stay silent. They are everyday objects that challenge traditional ways of telling history and challenge the historical selections we make.

The objects are places and spaces- a garret, a chest, a set of drawers, a casket: all images of rational organization but which evoke emotional responses of hiddenness of secrecy, of the memory, the garret as the memory zone of the house, as the dreaming space of the house. My collection will be housed in a theoretical garret. It will contain furnishings and boxes containing items that speak of someone’s past. It will contain allusions to a fisherman’s garret- to a space for making and mending nets, of forging connections, associating ideas, dreaming of past and future in a timeless space.

As a space out of time, it will also allude to my mother’s condition of forgetting, of losing the links, of losing words. Images with no names are powerful, and the basic ones are of comfort and security, but objects can be confused and become something else. This is not the cellar though, but “a space of rationalized projects,” or airy daydreams.

This will involve questioning what objects are, what objecthood, what a collection is, and looking at examples of different types of collection, in a broad sense, and in the narrower artistic sense, looking at how contemporary artists have utilised collection as a process.

A theoretical perspective will relate to phenomenology, with specific reference to Gaston’s Bachelard’s theory of the poetic image in his discussion of the meaning of spaces in “The Poetics of Space”.

Christine Bruce

Essay Draft 27.07.2018

This essay is an exploration of objects and their collection. I am mainly moved by found objects from the past, and the historical urge to collect in the sense of museology, but am interested in personal histories rather than larger narratives. I first want to explore the ontological territory of objecthood and what the desire to collect might mean, and then to consider how the nature of objects and the organizational principle of their collection and display can be used in art practice.

1. Context:

There is a will to know, to feel, to understand the past, our own personal histories and those of our forebears. We want to understand, to explain how and why, and to feel what others must have felt. We want to investigate versions of history. Christian Watt, my mother and my grandmother are examples of ordinary women whose histories have been bequeathed in various ways- Christian Watt’s through her published memoirs, my grandmother’s through clues gleaned despite her silence, my mother’s told willingly in stories, or in leakages that the mind would no longer contain, or now, being put back together in temporary bits and pieces, always against the unstoppable ravages of dementia. The history of such ordinary people is fragile, elusive, and I feel a responsibility for holding onto as much of it as I can, as it gives depth to my own past. There is an instinct to preserve. This instinct relates to our desire to live on in our own turn- to create a trail of history, to tell more stories, to leave traces, the better to mark our own ordinary place in history. We preserve and bequeath to stay alive.

The instinct to preserve extends to a desire to collect, to store, to lay up treasures, to engage in the “philosophy of having”, to set our mark on the earth, to lay claim to an identity, a location in space and time. In other words, to be, in a physical sense. We want to have a place, a phenomenological one, in the world, mapped out by possessions. These physical records and remains can become the materials for forensic investigation by historians and archeologists. When they are personal, family remnants, or recognizable objects such as common, homely goods, they require little in the way of abstract interpretation. We all understand the need to be housed and clothed and fed and can imagine what it is and has been to be an ordinary woman. We can respond with a lifetime of sensations and experiences, reading with the body and its senses how harsh the washboard was, how heavy the wet sheets, how the enamel pail must have clanked on the flagstones, or how the pot grew black on the fire. We can also respond with an appreciation of the poetry of objects that seem to transcend time; the stillness of a jug, the whiteness of linen, the symmetry of a pile of plates, we respond to with an intuitive sense, an imaginative understanding that someone else looks, sees and feels the same, the “phenomenology of the soul” which creates an instant neither now nor then. Objects, then, are both historical, inscribed by ownership or use, and ahistorical forms.

The story of Christian Watt makes a claim for the former, material objects establishing a person’s position in the world, and their loss jeopardizing their entire existence. She starts her account of her life by stating her genealogy, her blood connections with the past, and sets out her belongings as willed to her mother by her great grandmother, whence it came to her.

“At my death I give to the safe keeping of my Blessed Redeemer my soul….. I leave and bequeath all my worldly goods and chattels … to my great grand daughter Helen Noble or Lascelles… My dwelling house and offices above… at Broadsea consisting of two pine doors, i front door and two windows. All of the rafters, beams, none of which belong to Lord Saltoun, all my furnishings and plenishings. My great lines, my small lines, my kists and my blankets, my tea case and sugar bowl, copper wares and brass wares, kists and dressers and deeces, chairs and stools and clock…”

This list sets out who she is, what her origins and connections are, and what space she occupies in the world: it gives validation of her existence. The moment Christian is certified insane, i.e. not in possession of herself, all her material possessions, her inheritances, her house and its contents, her boat, become forfeit, the property of the crown, as she ceases to be considered a functioning human. Having and not having, being and non-being are correlates. Objects both ground us and make us people to be reckoned with. Remove them, and we too are erased.

On the other hand, objects are ahistorical, unworldly correlatives of our states of mind, and states of being. Renaissance poets spun elaborate conceits in which they drew out complex analogies between the observable world and the hidden life of emotions. In more recent times, psychologists have looked at how our relationship with familiar objects reveals our subconscious in dreams. Gaston Bachelard argues that verbally constructed poetic images create fully furnished spaces for our inner lives:

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life…. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us, and for us, they have a quality of intimacy.

Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word wardrobe?

In the works of poets, the image has the power to create objects in our imagination, objects that reverberate in multiple ways. Imaginative objects can provide us with us a form to house concepts so abstract we have no words for them. In this example Bachelard talks about how the poetic image becomes the essence of remembering in a timeless state where memory cannot be said to exist.

A poet can condense cosmic wealth into a slender casket…. The casket contains the things that are unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to give our treasures. Here the past, the present and the future are condensed. Thus the casket is memory of what is immemorial.

Objects, then, assert both reality and conceptuality. Objects are infinitely scalable- once we have the idea of an object, its essence, it can change its shape without losing the meaning. In discussing the idea of a place that one hides in, Bachelard quotes Victor Hugo, that for Quasimodo, Notre-dame Cathedral had been “egg, nest, house, country and universe”, that it was his “home, his hole, his envelope.. he adhered to it…like a turtle to its carapace…[it] was his armour..” Bachelard thus argues for the existence of a primal concept of the place of refuge, which can equally be instantiated as the corner, the nest, or the shell, as image objects “that bring out the primitive in us”.

Poetic images, Bachelard argues, may be constructed in words, but are phenomenological. The images created by words take on real proportions: “every poet of furniture- even if he be a poet in a garret, and therefore has no furniture- knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep.” The words carry responsibilities to be true to the life of the image, as if having created the imaginary object, it now exerts a power over its creator: “only an indigent soul would put just anything in a wardrobe… the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture. Here order reigns… Order is not merely geometrical; it also remembers the family history.” The object takes on human proportions, and human qualities: “It is not opened every day, and so, like a heart that confides in no-one, the key is not on the door…. If we give objects the friendship they should have, we do not open a wardrobe without a slight start.”

Romantic poets stressed the power of homely, everyday objects as the source of meditations on universal themes. Poetic images are not infinitely versatile but are variations on essential concepts: “If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing.” (189) Poetic images bring together memory, sense- perception and fantasy to recreate the world as something fresh while still being furnished to look familiar.

Thus, in terms of the ontology of the object, I am referring to everything from a rusty nail with which contact might necessitate a tetanus injection, i.e. a solid, with physical and chemical properties, to an object as a poetic hold-all of concepts, emotions and memories, an objective correlative. In the examples above, the objects are in collections, mainly in a domestic setting: they collectively furnish a place in the world, either real or imagined.

Now, my motivation here is to create art, to meld the interests above with the creation of something new that will communicate with an audience. To support my work, I would like to explore the ways in which artists gather and collect objects as artistic practice.

I am mainly interested in two principles of collection: firstly, analytic- rational, ordering, categorizing- the rational impulse we most often see in traditional museology: secondly- the fetishistic, trash-collecting, obsessive compulsive, related to selfhood and identity, which participates in the construction of “a world without me”. These ways of collecting are used with self-conscious awareness by artists whose work I will discuss.

(These ways of collecting may possess similarities with the real and imagined objects described above, and I would like to explore how the means of collection affects the ontological status of

the objects, and the story they tell. They are principles that I would like to refer to and apply to my own collection and recreation of objects.)

2. The analytic: Mark Dion

An artist whose work I have most recently been inspired by is Mark Dion, whose installations very overtly reference the first principle, the rational, the ordered, and categorized. On the surface, his installations can look like authentic recreations of a naturalist’s office, of a gentleman’s parlour, of a hunting hide, of a renaissance wunderkamer, and there is a satisfaction, both intellectual and aesthetic, in the imposition of order on a chaotic world.

In his Thames Dig work, we appreciate the order that has emerged from the sludge. Volunteers from the general public dug from the Thames mud items which were subsequently sorted and arranged in cabinets. The non-specialists’ garbage, the lighters, plastic toys, bottle tops, ring pulls, and other types of everyday detritus was ordered by the person acting as the “higher intelligence”, the artist, into something with pleasing arrangements of colours, shapes, and categories. The fact that they are displayed in beautiful custom made polished wood cabinets valorizes their status as archeological finds or items of intrinsic value and adds to the sense of awe experienced by the visitor. You pull out a smooth wooden drawer and find yourself impressed by the beauty of 50 bits of broken plastic, all shades of yellow, arranged in rows. There is beauty in order, even if what is ordered is complete tat.

Dion genuinely allows us to enjoy the sense of “discovery” in a world made new by the operation of reason. The scientific revolution overlapped with the Enlightenment and these must indeed have been exciting times. There were new means of observing and measuring natural phenomena, new ventures of cataloguing knowledge into encyclopedias, and a new sense of specialization, of expertise. A new age introduced a new discourse: classifying, categorizing, codifying, systematizing, ordering, cataloguing, which clarify how the world is organised according to laws and structures. Based on the newly articulated thinking patterns of Newtonian induction, this linked direct observation to generalisations in a way that created rigour. A theoretical framework of laws made manageable what was becoming a vast array of information about the world. At this stage in history, this was a breakthrough in systematic thinking. The Thames Dig exhibit allows us to appreciate this process as a fresh activity. Here is a set of findings from right under our feet, and here are the patterns we can see.

Objects are, in this formulation, interdependent, less important in themselves as in their place in a relationship. They are pieces of a jigsaw, and if we get them in the correct order, arranged according to how they should be, the whole picture becomes clear. When pieces of fossil were put together with ideas of natural selection, the whole picture of evolution emerged. When objects from a particular time period are put together they become realia in a vision of culture. We like to make links, to use inductive and deductive reasoning to fill the missing spaces

between objects. Pattern is harmonic and is consoling to our senses as well as to our intellect. The Thames dig exhibit is a glorious feast for the rationalist.

But at last, the critical theorist steps up and sees what is going on here, that joining the pieces together to create an evidence-based view of culture is a major smack in the face to anyone who thinks what we are leaving for posterity is of value. It shows our particular archeological layer to be characterized as one made up of plastic dross. These objects in relationship tell a story of what our civilization has come to, and it is not a happy one, according to adherents of the theory of the Anthropocene, such as Dion. This is a good example of using the organizational principle of analysis and rationalism to make a political point on scientific grounds, but employing the tools of the artist. The everyday thus becomes a higher philosophy.

However, it isn’t all about the science: there’s folk history too. Some of the finds evoke emotions, because they are items you remember from the past, and there is a pleasant shock of recognition. You see the detached arm of a plastic doll and remember how the plastic joint fitted into its plastic socket, and you know that the missing body had “Made in Hong Kong” printed on the back of its neck. You owned one once, and cared about it, but not enough, and now you see it curated, and by implication, given museum status, and it infuses you with nostalgic warmth. At this point, the collection shifts ground, and becomes less analytical and more about “the world without me”; the fetishist sees evidence of the self, evidence that s/he has lived and has left a trace, and that the trace is valued.

These simple excavated objects exist on several plains of existence. In summary, these objects are mental constructs in an intellectual model, they are semiotic tokens of our personal histories, and they are objects with phenomenological impact- they pollute therefore they are. They are metaphoric in that they offer an analogy for what humans are doing to the face of the earth: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

In addition, the way they are housed, the hand-made cabinets share the qualities of the poetic oneiric image of “the attic” (Bachelard 47)- the attic is a place to which we ascend, the place where rationality resides. It is the “brain” of the house, the seat of reason, the store of memories. On the other hand, with its intricate drawers and compartments, it partakes of the characteristics of M. Carre-Benoit’s filing cabinet (Bachelard 98), which is portrayed as a piece of furniture that has been substituted for a human intelligence, i.e. the principle of organization has overturned sense, and replaced it with administrative stupidity. By creating such quality cabinets, with their well-constructed drawers and compartments, Dion might stimulate our thinking about how we have valorized the rational over other ways of knowing. In conclusion, the way the objects are collected makes them rich in interpretive value, but the way they are housed and displayed also adds another layer of meaning.

In fact Dion’s installations are generally collections of objects inside a space, and that space is something to be interrogated. Dion frequently creates buildings, huts, offices and rooms within rooms as his installations, sometimes echoing the hallowed halls of academe, such as with a

19th century styled gentleman’s study, or whimsically, with a seagull shaped centre (refs.). These play with the idea of the “shape” of knowledge, and how it is “contained”. Dion’s installations illustrate how knowledge is always constructed by humans, not discovered in nature, and seem to encourage us to challenge that. The “Library of the Birds of Antwerp” was a cage that the viewer entered. Birds poo on the books, and in a sense poo-poo human learning and culture, but it’s still a cage. Although the birds inhabit the higher ground than the humans, there is no escape. The humans enter voluntarily, but there is no real “outside” the cage, only the larger building. The Thames dig installation allowed viewers to open drawers, to look into boxes that were full of objects not on display, but despite this element of interaction, the organizational principle remained. The boxes were labelled, and what they said on the outside was what they contained on the inside. That kind of transparency is seductive, because it speaks to what we have learned to think of as our “common sense”.

We can compare this man-made space, this constructedness, to the more organic and enveloping poetic space as described by Bachelard. Bachelard looks to the writings of poets and novelists and perceives a very different set of associations with the concept of housing and containment. He sees in the image of the building, specifically the house with its corners, stairs, attics and cellars, poetic spaces which can allow dreaming and setting the mind free. The house in the poetic sense is not a mere box or a container, but it has energy, it protects and hides, and it withstands the elements; it has both moral and physical power. The house as experienced by the poet is not only “a geometrical object….visible and tangible, made of well hewn solids and well fitted framework….” But it transposes itself to the human plane when it is experienced in intimacy: “Independent of all rationality, the dream world beckons.” The archetype of the house, as discerned in poetics, has an attic for a brain. “In the attic it is a pleasure to see the bare rafters of the strong framework. Here we participate in the carpenter’s solid geometry…. When we dream of heights we are in the rationalized zone of intellectualized projects.” The cellar is something else, darker, more mysterious. This is perhaps because these poetic images often stem from our more “primitive selves”, our pre-educated, pre-rational, childhood selves, when emotion has more power than reason. Poets and novelists, Bachelard claims, use rooms and houses as “psychological diagrams” in their analysis of intimacy. The places and spaces in literary images expand and contract in an oneiric atmosphere, in which “inhabited space transcends geometrical space”, implying that the inhabitants are not engineers with plumblines and measurements, but sensual, emotional beings in whom reason does not always reign supreme.

Thus, the place where a collection is housed may be an institutional site, such as in a traditional museum, or it may be a site that projects intimacy, and invites a different type of interaction. Dion’s Naturalist’s Study is set out as an inviting immersive environment that the viewer can spend time in, sitting on comfortable chairs and browsing books and decorations. The warm plum colours, the mahogany woodwork, the framed pictures on the walls, the books on the tables, the vitrines, patterned wallpaper that looks like it is a William Morris design, and oriental rugs of the type that travelers would have brought back for trips, all evoke a learned

Victorian gentleman’s chamber. It has the comfort that comes from familiarity with the conventions, the room of scholar and a collector from a different age. When you look more closely at the collection and the paintings, some of them confirm this scenario, while others subvert it- there are photos, which are anachronistic, and there are items that would have come from a pre-Victorian era of exploration, such as the unicorn horn, which may also indicate that the Naturalist is a bit of an amateur. We come to realise though that this collection is in fact Dion’s. The books are those he has written or which have been written about him, or which have been strong influences on him. The pictures on the walls are his engravings, and the objects in the vitrines are works from his collections. They represent current issues, such as the series of tar drawings of trees, and a single tarred sculpture of a pigeon, which speak directly of a contemporary concern about the environment. These works are a collection of his objects from different periods, now being presented as a collection within a collection. Through the fake persona of the 19th century naturalist, Dion invites us into a chamber about himself, to read and understand the context of his works. It was a space that resonated intimacy but was nevertheless a type of stage-set, with a physically absent main character but a clear didactic purpose to show the deleterious effect of mankind’s power over nature.

3. The Fetishistic

A number of conceptual artists have engaged in the practice of collecting items that are the same or similar, and then exhibiting them to allow a narrative to emerge. These might be items confiscated in the post (Taryn Simon, 2010), all the prescriptions written for a sick father (Diana Ali) etc. There is an element of orderliness and emotionlessness in the process whereby these objects are collected, however. The emotional response is evoked in the viewer, whereas the artist seems to have been operating somewhat automatically.

In contrast, some objects have emotional power because of what has been invested in them. This type of artwork may be avowedly unanalytic, irrational and driven by pure feeling. An example of this is Song Dong’s project “Waste Not” 2009, which he co-credits to his mother Zhao Xiangyuan, as it was her lifetime’s collection of belongings, old, broken, and with very little likelihood of being reused, that constituted the art work. His mother’s habit of never throwing anything away references both cultural belief and a history of hardship. In this installation, the framework is provided by the actual wooden house where his mother lived, and although the organizational principle is the respectful folding and laying out of items in tidy groups, this is carried out by the artist (according to the installation text, Zhao “buried herself” with the things she collected). By respecting her fetish, and referencing both her and his father, the artist has created an homage to his mother, while at the same time delivering a message about survival and the will to hang on to the remnants of life that has been lived, to remember the good and the bad. In this case, it is the artist who rationalizes what the objects can mean to a potential audience, while, according to the exhibition notes, Zhao Xiangyuan was collecting in an irrational and obsessive way that she did not understand.

(unfinished) Boltanski- objects standing in for people- affective. Objects as symbols, as the equivalent of the poetic image- poetic because of their resonances and multiple meanings.

Conclusion: My BoW: A history of affective objects

Objects without obvious meaning, such as Zhao’s used materials, can evoke the most pathos. Similarly, an object that has been lost, is one with a history, but no link to its past. (Like the foundling token). This is the pathos alluded to in the lines by Jimmie Durham ‘Object’ (1964)

..Places change, and a small object

Stands defiant in its placelessness.

Durable because it contains intensely meanings

Which it can no longer pour out.

This is the tragedy of phenomenology, the fabric of reality, the existence of objects. The sadness of the brocante, the junkshop, derives from the sense of objects which have lost their bearings. Worse still are items which are still effectively grouped as a lot that that has come in a house clearance. Their erstwhile owner’s presence is still palpable, as is the understanding that no one wanted to inherit the objects, which are now cursed to live on.

What I am interested in is making sense of objects that remain- in anchoring them (and myself) to a past by making meanings, by collecting or (re) creating objects in a context of personal/folk history, a set of works that will evoke the past of fisher people, of the ordinary women, of their domestic spaces, and will make affective meaning from ordinary objects. This is a metaphor for how we make meaning of ordinary people, and thus assert their significance. It’s a way of fighting against erasure.

It’s also a story of poetic images, of a few key objects that stood for a lot more. The rusty nail held the floor boards together in the cottage, or joined the rafters. But it also evoked Christ on the cross, the narrative that sustained the people of the time such as Christian Watt. The wardrobe, the drawers, the net, the catch- all affective and symbolic objects when understood in their historical, geographical and cultural context. Bachelard’s theory of the poetic image is important as a way of understanding the solidity of images, of making a link between the conceptual and the actual. The fisherman’s kist is a generic chest, and holds all the promise and threat of any such container. The fisherman’s gansey is a generic seamless garment. They are all symbols, in a network of symbols that amplify each other.

Key texts (annotated bibliography)

Annotated Bibliography

Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space. 1964. Trans Jolas, M. UK, Penguin.

This is a key text for explaining the power of the poetic image, and making a phenomenological claim. Bachelard’s discussion of the images used by poets and novelists for the spaces in the home provide a framework for the essay and a network of associations for the body of work.

Barthes, R. Camera Lucida. 1981. NY

In this text Barthes explores the truth value of photography, as he explores the emotional connections made in a photo of his mother, and claims that “a photograph is a certificate of existence”. This was a text that resonated with me when I started making prints of my mother, and gave me lots of material for reflection and for printmaking work. The text seems out of date in terms of the manipulability of the image these days, but it is stating a truth about analogue images, and thus has much to contribute to a discussion of evidencing history.

Bishop, C. Installation Art: A Critical History. 2005. UK, Tate.

In the context of Dion’s work, and of my own ambitions, this is a very useful overview.

Blazwick, I. (Ed.) Mark Dion, Theatre of the Natural World. Exhibition Catalogue. 2018. London, Whitechapel Gallery.

The catalogue of Dion’s Whitechapel retrospective

Derrida, J. On Grammatology.

Hyperrational philosophy. (But humans are not hyperrational beings…)

Dion, M. Mark Dion. 1997. London, Phaidon Press.

Insights into Dion’s working methods.

Farr, I. (Ed.) Memory. 2012. Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press.

A theoretical perspective on memory with examples of artists who have engaged with the concept.

Flint, L. Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st Century Naturalist. 2017. Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art/ Yale University Press.

A collection of essays and discussions of Dion’s work.

Fraser, D. (Ed.) The Christian Watt Papers. 1983. Edinburgh, Paul Harris Publishing.

The text that forms the subject matter of my body of work, a biography of a mid-19th century Scottish fishwife who spent most of her life in a mental asylum.

Gray, C. and Mallins, J. Visualising Research: a guide to the research process in Art and Design. 2004. UK, Ashgate e-Book.

A guide to carrying out doctoral level research in the arts

Gribbin, J. Science, A History 1543-2001. 2001. UK, Penguin.

A very readable book on the development of scientific thinking and the evolution of scientific ideas.

Harari, Y.N. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. 2014. London, Vintage.

A current bestseller, full of lots of big ideas on how we have evolved: highly relevant to thinking about philosophy, disciplinarity and the state of the world.

Holmes, R. The Age of Wonder: how the Romantic Generation discovered the beauty and terror of science. 2008. London, Harper Collins.

A very readable resource on the opposition of reason and imagination, the clash of sensibilities, and an early version of the 20th century culture war described by CP Snow.

Hudek , A. (Ed.) The Object. 2014. Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press.

Highly theoretical and a key resource for thinking about objecthood.

Jennings, H. Pandaemonium: 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. 1985. UK, Andre Deutsch.

A resource that taps the language of the time, a synchronic approach to history.

Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 1996. UK, Routledge.

A very good resource for reading visual images as if they are a language. Useful for my discussion of the discourse surrounding public/display space.

Kubler, G. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. 1962. USA, Yale University.

I struggle with this one, tbh, but it’s on the reading list!

Kuhn, T. The structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962. USA, University of Chicago Press.

Seminal text on how thinking happens within a discipline: Introduces idea of the paradigm shift

Lange-Berndt, P. (Ed.) Materiality. 2015. Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press.

Theoretical discussions and extracts from artists discussing the material element in their work.

Larson, K. Where the Heart Beats. 2013. USA, Penguin.

An account of the influence of Zen Buddhism on the development of key artists: important in relation to the theme of rationality, and hyperrationality in postmodern philosophy

Malbert, R. and Mitchell, J. Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical Prints. 2016. UK, Hayward Press.

Louise Bourgois is another example of an artist who seems to write “with the body” and I want to keep her work in mind. This particular collection is interesting because it is about a personal history.

Mereweather, C. The Archive. 2006. Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press.

Theoretical discussions and extracts from artists discussing the idea of the archive in their work.

Moran, J. Interdisciplinarity. The New Critical idiom series. 2002. U.K. Routledge.

The main source for my discussion of historiography.

O'Doherty, B. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. 1999. USA, University of California.

A semiology of the gallery, useful for my discussion of the discourse surrounding public/display space.

Obrist, H.U. Ways of curating. 2014, UK. Penguin.

This is relevant for looking at how collections are presented and how differing types of interactions with the viewers can be organized. Curation is part of meaning-making.

Petry, M. Nature Morte: Contemporary artists reinvigorate the still-Life tradition. 2013, London. Thames and Hudson.

A beautiful book of contemporary approaches to still life, which sits well with the theoretical texts “The Object” and “Materiality”.

Rijksmuseum Boerhaave. Vrohlijke Frankensten. 2018. Catalogue for the exhibition “Frankenstein, een niewe mens” at Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Leiden.

This is a lovely book on an excellent exhibition which showcased the story of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and included an exhibition of works that merged art and science in such a way that sometimes it was difficult to tell fact from fiction. It could provide a model for incorporating the Christian Watt story into a series of works.

Uglow, J. Nature’s Engraver: A life of Thomas Bewick. 2006. UK, Faber and Faber.

An approach to representing the natural world that combines “accuracy and beauty” and established the discourse surrounding how woodcut printing interpreted the environment. I read this as a companion to Xu Bing’s study of the morphology of the Chinese woodcut, which is a highly rule-bound process.

Journal/ Book Chapters by theme

1.The Truth value of photographs

Art and PhotographySource: The New Path, Vol. 2, No. 12 (Dec., 1865), pp. 198-199

2. Female Body Narratives

Body Narratives in Canada, 1968-99: Sarah Maloney, Catherine Heard, and Kathleen SellarsAuthor(s): Lianne McTavishSource: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Autumn, 2000 - Winter, 2001), pp. 2+5-11Published by: Woman's Art Inc.

Fetishism and Visual Seduction in Mary Kelly's "Interim"Author(s): Emily ApterSource: October, Vol. 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn, 1991), pp. 97-108Published by: The MIT Press

Louise Bourgeois: The Art of MemoryAuthor(s): Larry QuallsSource: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 38-45Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc

ReviewReviewed Work(s): Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art by Mignon NixonReview by: Julia Bryan-WilsonSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Dec., 2007), pp. 823-826Published by: College Art Association

3. Cultural and Biographical objects

The Many-Layered Cultural Lives of Things Experiments in Multidisciplinary Object Study at a Local House Museum in St. LouisAuthor(s): Heidi Aronson KolkSource: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 47, No. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2013), pp. 161-196Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc.

MATERIALITY AND POLITICS IN CHILE'S MUSEUM OF MEMORY AND HUMAN RIGHTSAuthor(s): ANDRÉS ESTEFANESource: Thresholds, No. 41, REVOLUTION! (Spring 2013), pp. 158-171Published by: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Oral heirlooms: the vocalisation of loss and objectsAuthor(s): Aarthi AjitSource: Oral History, Vol. 43, No. 2, DISJUNCTIONS (AUTUMN 2015), pp. 70-78Published by: Oral History Society

Performing the MuseumAuthor(s): Charles R. GaroianSource: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Spring, 2001), pp. 234-248Published by: National Art Education Association

4. The Homunculus in literature

Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of ContainersAuthor(s): Hunter DukesSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Summer 2017), pp. 75-89Published by: Indiana University Press

5. Narrative voices: unreliable memoirs

Chapter Title: DISTURBING MEMORIES. NARRATING EXPERIENCES AND EMOTIONS OF DISTRESSING EVENTS IN THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGIONChapter Author(s): Susan BroomhallBook Title: Memory before ModernityBook Subtitle: Practices of Memory in Early Modern EuropeBook Editor(s): Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, Jasper van der SteenPublished by: Brill. (2013

Allan Beveridge, Fiona Watson. The psychiatrist, the historian and The Christian Watt Papers.History of Psychiatry, SAGE Publications, 2006, 17 (2), pp.205-221.

News articles

I also have linked to a number of articles of interest and relevance on my blog, each with a short commentary showing the link to my thinking.

www.uncontainedsite.wordpress.com/category/research/

Resources:

I have a collection of texts, and have access to journal databases at work, as well as subscribing to online journals.

Sites/ Visits

Rijksmuseum Boerhaave