Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This is the nal issue of Artfractures Quarterly before we amalgamate and become Art
Fractures Journal in conjunction with Birkbeck College in London. Our new journal
and publication will centre around issues and debates focusing upon contemporary
curatorial practice. It will feature peer-reviewed articles and writing from scholars and
curators around the world. We hope that our readers will continue to follow us through
new and exciting times.
Artfractures welcomes two new additions to our editorial board: Kath Wood from the
Firstsite Gallery in Colchester (UK) and Francis Di Tommaso, curator of the School
of Visual Arts in New York.
Artfractures wishes to thank all our loyal readership and those who support and work
within the journal.
John Finlay
Editor
In this issue
Art Theory, Critique and the Aesthetic Ideology
Jeremy Spencer p.5
One-point perspective and other Renaissance ideas in Gentile da Fabrianos
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple from The Strozzi Altarpiece, 1423
Ramesh Ramsahoye p.12
Book Review: Beauty by Roger Scruton
Martin Boland p.21
Beyond Painting?
John Finlay p.25
Jill Townsley: Moments of Repetition
Robert Luzar p.30
Unspeaking Engagements, Lanchester Gallery Projects
Steve Swindells p.36
Life: A Users Manual, Art Shefeld 2010
Steve Swindells p.39
Belief in This World: Carlos Reygadas Silent Light (2007)
Sam Ishii-Gonzales p.40
Contributors p.44
Notes for submissions p.45
Cover photography by John Wallett
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(L) Railway tracks showing the basic principles of one-point linear perspective. The lines created by the rails which
lead into the distance are known as orthogonals. The horizontals formed by the sleepers are usually referred to as
transversals. (R) The Florence Baptistery, c. 1060, seen from the steps of the Duomo
Donatello, St George and the Dragon, marble, 1415-17 Orthogonal lines traced from the loggia of the building to the
right of the composition converge onto a vanishing point located on the torso of St. George.
Donatello had clearly grasped the mathematics behind Brunelleschis method and even
includes a section of the perspective grid on the oor of the classical loggia to the
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Reconstruction of how vanishing points would have been traced from the Baptistery on Brunelleschis Test Panel
In his later explanation of perspective, Alberti placed such emphasis on the central
vanishing point that it is often overlooked that in Brunelleschis experiment the
geometric structure of the Baptistery would have produced three, with orthogonals
converging either side of the building as well as one at its centre.
As has been explained, the third, central vanishing point, created by the oor
modules of the baptistery, was hidden in the nal panel. However, Gentile actually
includes all of the three vanishing points which were the basis of Brunelleschis
perspective construction. However, two are located just beyond the frame and so have
been overlooked by art historians. Gentile had understood the geometry of perspective
after all. He had just not integrated the observer and the proportions of the human
gure into his schema or linked his temple mathematically with the surrounding space.
He may well have seen the nal panel but not Brunelleschis original plan and elevation,
with the all important oor modules within the Baptistery. This would have given him
the key to integrating the interior of the temple with the space between with the
temple and the observer. He even opts to leave this area out of his composition as a
means of disguising his inability to fully connect the various spaces of his charming
little cityscape.
Although perhaps not fully initiated into the secrets of perspective, Gentile was
clearly not entirely out of step, nor unaware of the new classical discoveries that would
soon change the course of art and transform western civilization. For example, the
loggia of the building to the right of the temple resembles Brunelleschis classicial
design for the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, 1419-23. The Corinthian columns and
distinctive round arches of Gentiles painted architecture purposefully recall ancient
Roman buildings. However, he does not seem to have had a full understanding of
Roman systems of proportion. Not only do the supports have a slender, attenuated
appearance, the arches look small in relation to the height of the columns, giving
the structure a Romanesque character. It was Brunelleschi who would be the rst to
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Filippo Brunelleschi, Ospedale Degli Innocenti, 1419 (directed by Brunelleschi until 1427)
Squatting in the street before Gentiles loggia is a bedraggled beggar - his skin,
browned by the sun, informing us that he has been homeless for some time. The
viewer is prompted to pity him and respond sympathetically to his plight. Loggias
were frequently used on the facades of insitutions of public charity at this time, such
as the building by Brunelleschi already cited, and the Ospedale di San Matteo - a structure
of essentially Gothic design. By mimicking Brunelleschis classical architecture for the
Ospedale Gentile connects Christian charity with specically Roman values of dutiful
citizenship, of which the most eloquent exponent was the statesman Cicero
Because each person thus has for his own a portion of those things which were common by nature,
let each hold undisturbed what has fallen to his possession. In anyone endeavours to obtain more for
himself, he will violate the law of human society. But since, as it has been well said by Plato, we are
not born for ourselves alone; since our country claims a part in us, our parents a part, our friends a
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Masolino and Masaccio, The Healing of the Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha, fresco, 1427, Brancacci Chapel
St Peters toga-like robes and the round arches of the buildings faade evoke ancient
Rome in a similar way to Gentiles image. The message of Masaccios painting is clear
- it is Roman values of civic virtue and public service as well as Christian virtue that
must come to the aid of Florentine society and each citizen is urged to adopt them,
including the well dressed dandies who trot past, absorbed in their own conversation
and blind to the plight of their fellow man.
In addition to being concerned with the same classical virtues, Gentiles predella
deliberately links contemporary social deprivation to the theme of the Presentation of
Christ in the Temple - but why? To answer this question we must turn to two popular
devotional texts of the time, Jacopo de Voragines Golden Legend and the Meditations on
the Life of Christ by the Pseudo-Bonaventure. In both texts the circumcision of Christ
in the temple is presented as a preguration of the Passion as it is the rst shedding
of Christs blood. It therefore relates to the ultimate salvation Christ promised to the
destitute. However, in the Golden Legend the circumcision is also specically linked to
charitable duties.
For a contemporary viewer familiar with this devotional text, the scene with the beggar
therefore formed a prompt to meditation that would have been readily understood. A
worshipper would have easily grasped the message that their own spiritual circumcision
could only be achieved by good works - they must help the poor and the needy in the
city of Florence.
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Beauty
by Roger Scruton
Oxford University Press 2009
Martin Boland
Beauty has become a dirty word in parts of the contemporary art world. If used at
all, the word is surrounded by ironic inverted commas. At present, to judge something
beautiful is to reduce it to the decorative and ornamental, to suggest that the aboriginal
creative impulse has been subordinated in favour of the bourgeois pursuit of painterly
form. This is the disdained art of the Salon. Art historians remind us that it was
here that the art of repetitive, futile gestures turned art into an exercise in good taste.
Therefore, only an iconoclasm that was willing to vandalise the idea of beauty could
emancipate the artist from such visual stagecraft. Manet, the art history books tell us,
threw the rst stone.
In the nineteenth century, John Keatss poetic aphorism, Beauty is truth, truth
beauty seemed to distil the aesthetic ideals of an age. But in the 1950s Andy Warhol
appeared to subvert this Romantic notion of beauty with his painting of a shoe entitled,
Beauty is shoe. Beauty was no longer to be associated with the most noble of ideals,
but was anything the artist declared it to be. With evangelical zeal, contemporary artists
have preached that beauty is a false illusion, an opiate that dulls an acute sense of
the existential futility at the core of our beings. Beauty has no redemptive power,
they argue, beauty is dead. Chaos reigns... as the fox says in Lars von Triers lm,
Antichrist.
In an age where meaning is porous and a goulash of opinions relativise the belief
that there is a truth to be known by reason, the relationship between the visual arts
and beauty disintegrates. According to Arthur Danto this ...effectively liberated artists
from the imperative to create only what is beautiful, and at the same time freed the
philosophy of art from having to concern itself with the analysis of beauty... It follows
that creating beauty is but one option for artists, who also have the choice of injuring
or merely disregarding beauty. Writing in 1948, Barnett Newman provided a mission
statement for contemporary art: The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy
beauty. Thus many accept that Arts purpose is to desecrate, transgress and create
altars to the beauty of ugliness because this is where reality supposedly exists. So,
Luc Tuymans can say, I am not so much interested in the spiritual aspects of culture
beauty or poetic descriptions of beauty dont seem real enough for me. Reality is
actually far more important than any form of spirituality. Realism. Its much more
interesting to crawl from underneath to the so-called top.
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The true modernist, according to Scruton, does not break with tradition but develops
an hermeneutic of continuity with the past. The tradition is not jettisoned or destroyed
but, rather, restored and puried of distorting accretions. It offers a cultural store
through which contemporary concerns, in all their complexity, might be approached.
In this way, human beings can ...consecrate human life and endow it with more than
worldly signicance. We recognise that Beauty is not a social construct, but that it is a
need anchored in our natures . It reassures us that our world is not an alien jurisdiction
but our home.
At the same time, as Immanuel Kant recognised, beauty also provides us with
transcendental horizons, those longings to reach beyond that which is imperfect, chaotic
and destructive and strain towards a less worldy realm. Modernism was not conceived
as a transgression but as a recuperation, writes Scruton, an arduous path back to a
hard-won inheritance of meaning, in which beauty would again be honoured.
This slim volume punches above its weight. It is a thoughtful assault on the
facetious ephemera that wins too many prizes and litters art fairs. Above all, Beauty
is a prophetic cry against that priestly caste of curators and art theorists who dictate
what is art but on the imsiest philosophical grounds. Scruton believes that beauty is a
universal value that articulates in a unique way the truth of who we are. Beauty is truth,
truth beauty. Scrutons cri de coeur is one worth listening to.
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Beyond Painting?
John Finlay
A recurring philosophical and moral dilemma arising out of the post-World War II atrocities
has been question of the very existence of art after the Holocaust. Theodor Adornos famous
aphorism, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has been repeated so endlessly that it
is almost a clich: an authoritarian remark (later retracted) that inhibits our right to examine
the real nature of such a statement or to discuss it within the context of a wider debate
regarding the arts. The determining remark that all art should have the audacity to tackle
this subject matter without criticism, reproach or moral impeachment, raises the question
of whether it is only ever possible to document the Holocaust, but to commemorate or
portray the events by, for example, means of painting or sculpture, is perhaps to go beyond
the boundaries of representing such atrocities?
So putting on an exhibition dealing with the inexpressible acts that took place
in the Nazi death camps seriously forces one to consider whether this is really an
appropriate subject for an exhibition showcasing works of art. It seems, to reiterate
Adornos phrase, almost barbaric to think of justifying a display of paintings evoking
the unthinkable suffering in Auschwitz-Berkenau, Bernburg, Majdanek, Mauthausen
and Dachau: places synonymous with heinous crimes against humanity. Let me give
you an example. Established as a mental home in 1875, one block of Bernburg hospital,
near Magdeburg, Germany, was handed over to Operation T4 of the Nazi euthanasia
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art production, where she describes it as ...something in every system that cannot be
fully understood or fully cognized: the unrepresentable. [2]
We may wonder if seeing a physical reaction of materials, as in the de-composition
of a form, is a way of providing a closer proximity to repetition as ontologically
unpresentable. Yet when Labourwork 5 does collapse, as the video displays it
progressively and slowly crumbling, Townsley is offering the viewer the chance to
hypothesize where exactly abstract repetition occurs. It lies somewhere within the
tension and dissipation of physical energy, which is released as each rubber band
breaks. Seeing the demise of a pyramid is like viewing the fall of an architectural
goliath and allowing an effective approach to understanding repetition through the
familiar materials of plastic and rubber. Not by repeating through manufacture of the
object-unit, or the larger sculpture, but by seeing these material constructs naturally
dissolve, do we begin to get a glimpse at the process as a series of abstract forces.
Abstraction is reiterated by the purely geometric shapes and forms present in
these works, either as squares, cubes, or triangles. Considering these compositional
motifs as architectural constructions, recalls Wilhelm Worringers dictum that works
of art which he exemplied through gothic ornamentation (spires, repetitive coiling
lines) and a plethora of of non-representational designs each directly expresses the
forces that govern an impulse for creating the work. Worringer comments how this
activity and impulse stems from an obsession with a kind of embodied matter, and is
characteristic of the graphic motif of a line:
The unsatised impulse existing in this confusion of lines, clutching greedily at every new
intensication, to lose itself nally in the innite, is its impulse, its life. [3]
It is the motif of the line that particularly making this impulse, as a process of vitality,
immanent and graphic in matter. In Labourwork 7 - Scribble to the Count of Five,
Townsley employs the line in an obsessive activity of marking it out onto paper. In
part she tries to provide a limit to scribbling black lines endlessly, lling out the white
paper into a black square. Her decision is to use 500 repetitions of scribbling, while
counting to ve (repeated ve times) in order to arrest, what is otherwise an impulse to
repeat without end. In its nal appearance the count satises the drawing of a larger,
homogeneous black square. In contradistinction from the spoons, or coils, here one
can barely nd a part, or elementary unit within it; the black line disappears into a
black, graphic mass.
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Both the square and the scribble can be distinguished, as Townsley also presents a video
derived from documenting the process of her executing the square from beginning to
end, from white to black; but as an opaque mark both motifs coincide. Townsley marks,
records, and presents what can appear as a monument of process: an opaque surface,
or limit to perception and spatial access. In its black surface it appears as an enlarged
detail of the microcosmic line. With this gesture she in turn brings a critical perspective
to the moment of repetition, that phase of labouring and scribbling for an obscene
length of time. The opacity of this surface reects nothing more, no recollection of
the experience, except a repression of the act of a compulsion to repeat. What makes
Townsley repeatedly scribble, even to ve-hundred cycles?
The video that accompanies the scribble drawing could be perceived as a method
of rendering a motive that is either unconscious, or which only Townsley was conscious
of during the extensive endurance activity of scribbling. What we see are ve monitors,
playing a video recording of the development of the drawing. We see a beginning, a white
page, and an end, a black square, and then the sequence plays again. It is perhaps the loop
as much as the black mark that the instant of repetition and its cessation for accomplishing
its representation can be perceived as simultaneously surface and interval. As a point the
square demonstrates a mark as a limit to an absolute encounter of repetition. To use
Gilles Deleuzes articulation, repetition is a notion without a concept. It is, as he states,
...not a specic form informing a matter, not a memory informing a present, but the
pure and empty form of time.[4] Counting to ve, and scribbling 500 cycles is a purely
functional strategy to bring some presence to an empty form of repetition, just enough
to touch upon it without completely erasing the count altogether.
Whereas one can use the spoons to cast his imagination, and try to sense the effect
of repetition, the black square is a visible testament to the inert quality of the black line
that scribbles it into place. Repetition may be without any entity. One cannot see it as
a black obstruction to visibility and intelligibility. The video, however, with its frantic
sounds of marks scouring a surface, draws our attention to be, even partially, in the
moment of something seemingly senseless as pure repetition. With both the video and
the marks we experience the gesture of drawing upon repetition, in its moment of and
as an operation. There is perhaps no tangible conceptual framework to be identied
in this moment, which is why one can at least listen, see, and almost feel repetition as
a hazy presence.
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(detail) 840 Satie, 2006 (Video and Chalkboard, 1250 x 820 mm)
Saties act inevitably failed at the fteenth hour of the performance; at 840 repetitions
of the same melody, the number accomplishes the instant when the mind ceases
to endure a repetition that is a priori aimless. Townsley references Eric Satie, with
Labourwork 8 - Satie 840. Again, she incorporates the loop of a video to show her
hand inscribing numbers in chalk on a blackboard. Replacing Saties sonic interval with
that of an ephemeral rendering of a number, Townsleys gesture is seen as an erasure
of each instant of Satie repeating the melody. This action provides a summary of
how repetition, as a fundamental operation of process, can be expressed in her work.
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Unspeaking Engagements
Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry University,
12 February 19 March 2010.
Steve Swindells
The artists in Unspeaking Engagements explore processes of physical and/or durational
engagement as a means of constituting the artwork. Each address their own or the
viewers awareness of their body in relation to time and space. At issue are questions
of how such awareness can be cultivated, felt, represented and ultimately proliferated
through the work of art. Unspeaking Engagements showcases artworks as sites of shifting
experiences, in differentiation from artworks that require detached observation and
propose xed or nal interpretations.
The exhibition proposes a detailed understanding of major questions within
international contemporary art practices - who does what, how, when, and to whom
and consequently links theoretical debates about the intersection of performance
and performativity to more recent critical issues of relational or participatory art.
Moreover, the international basis of Unspeaking Engagements highlights different terms
for understanding common methods and aims. Theories and sensibilities developed
in one part of the world can be radically tested in another, provoking unexpected
intensities and new formations.
Andrew Spackman, a Senior Lecturer at Coventry School of Art and Design has
written a compelling ctional and actual review of the exhibition. In one aspect of his
review Andrew poses a number of reactions, questions and problems that emanate
from the altered-states the work suggests.
i. The artists start with the notion of the body, but present dislocated versions of themselves.
Fictional characters playing out challenging, riddle-some, but seemingly futile and purposeless tasks.
ii. The artists seem to attempt communication but the language is obscured. It is beyond
international, but is not merely personal either. Perhaps the work and the viewer are being placed in
a state of oscillation. The work oscillates between states of something and nothing. Could something
be knowledge and nothing is experience?
iii. If oscillation is occurring, what is the transmitted wave? And why does the artist seek to set this
oscillation in motion? Why do they feel the need to mess us about? Repetition is good. Repetition
seems to be the pivot point that all other things balance/rotate. Repetition is the works forcefulness,
whilst its message is a quiet deadly whisper.
iv. Has the xed, knowable, known become a problem for artist? A stuck space. Is oscillation a
narrow band of avoidance?
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In Ordet the rhythm is so masterfully, and so minutely, controlled that initially it seems
almost to have been snuffed out. First time viewers will, no doubt, be puzzled by the
slowness with which events unfold, with which the actors move and say their lines. And
yet, as the lm proceeds, the glacial pacing becomes increasingly more compelling, even
logical, and what initially feels labored takes on a new quality, a sense of inevitability
an inexorable movement that brings us to the threshold of a revelation. The climax
has extraordinary force and power, but only if you experience the lm as an organic
whole, only if you experience the denouement as the harmonic resolution to all that
has come before it. (At the level of structure, the climax provides closure through the
cessation of movement. At the level of the narrative, however, the end is an opening.
This tension between levels is part of what makes the nale so emotionally complex
and rewarding.)
As the lm scholar David Bordwell observes, The primary function of [Dreyers]
long takes is to foreground the shot itself as a component of cinematic perception.[2]
The shot is no longer simply a narrative unit in a larger signifying chain, but imbued
with its own signicance. Each shot, as Bordwell says, ...creates its own rhythmic
ensemble.[3] We are not asked simply to scan the image and (impatiently) await the
arrival of the next one but to become absorbed, fascinated, by what is placed in front
of us and to take it in at a certain deliberate, measured pace. This is what we nd as
well in Reygadas: a request that we remain within this shot, that we immerse ourselves
in this thing, that we become absorbed in the beauty of this world. From the opening
nearly ve-minute long take of a blanket of stars and the sun slowly emerging over
the horizon (and which will be rhymed with the nal shot), Reygades demonstrates a
similar attention to and mastery of duration. I dont wish to suggest to the reader that
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Contributors
Fr. Martin Boland is the Dean of Brentwood Catherdral and writes The Invisible
Province blog at http://theinvisibleprovince.blogspot.com
John Finlay studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (1989-92) and
received his doctorate from the Courtauld in 1998. He is an independent art historian
of French history and culture, specializing in twentieth century modern art, and is
a regular contributor to Apollo, Sculpture and H-France. He is a regular contributor to
to a number of international art journals and magazines including Sculpture, Apollo
and Bonhams magazine. He is also a cultural commentator and currently writes a
weekly art column for New Zealands national newspaper, The Press.
Sam Ishii-Gonzales is a Principle Faculty Member in the Department of Media
Studies and Film, The New School in New York City
Robert Luzar has an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design
(UAL), London and is currently enrolled on the PhD progremme at Central Saint
Martins College of Art & Design (UAL), London.
Robert Priseman studied Aesthetics and Art theory at the University of Essex
before taking up Painting full-time in 1992.
Ramesh Ramsahoye studied Art History and Theory at Essex University (198992) and received an MA from the Courtauld in 1993. He is an independent art
historian specializing in seventeenth century Dutch art. He is also a scholar of Italian
Renaissance Art and Architecture. He lives and teaches in County Wexford in the
Republic of Ireland.
Jeremy Spencer completed his PhD in the Department of Art History and Theory
at the University of Essex and lectures in Contextual Studies at the Colchester
School of Art and Design.
Dr Steve Swindells is Reader in Fine Art at Hudderseld University.
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