Claire Barclay Dysfunctional Objects Seminar

Friday 20 March, 5.30–8pm

This seminar investigates the nature of making sculptural objects and their references to functional objects. Speakers include:

Jeanne Cannizzo (anthropologist, University of Edinburgh)
Stephen Feeke (curator, Henry Moore Institute)
Dean Hughes (artist, Edinburgh College of Art)
Chantal Knowles (principal curator, Oceania, Americas and Africa, National Museums of Scotland)
Alistair Rider (art historian, University of St. Andrews)

Chair: Dominic Paterson (art historian, University of Glasgow)

For more information on the speakers and their papers please see below.

 

 Jeanne Cannizzo: Material Matters: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Chantal Knowles: The Canoe That Cannot Sail: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Stephen Feeke: Unidentified Museum Objects: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Dean Hughes: Aimlessness: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Alistair Rider: Claire Barclay’s Second Nature : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dominic Paterson (Chair) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the History of Art Department, University of Glasgow. His PhD thesis addressed the role of aesthetics in the work of Michel Foucault, and the relevance of Foucault to the practice of critical art history. His current research interests are focused on strategies of citation, rearticulation and reanimation in contemporary art practice, including of Simon Starling, Cornelia Parker, Josiah McElheny and others. He is also a frequent contributor to MAP magazine.

Chantal Knowles: The Canoe That Cannot Sail
Knowles looks at an ongoing collaboration between George Nuku, Maori artist, and National Museums Scotland. Nuku, who works in perspex rather than traditional wood, is repairing an existing nineteenth-century wooden Maori waka (war canoe). Through the process of research and repair the canoe has become more of a conundrum; a composite of old canoes and new carving, it brings together work by several Maori carvers. With no fixed time or space and no clear function, the canoe will serve as a case study to expand upon some of the themes of Barclay’s work.
 
Chantal Knowles is an ethnographer who looks after the Oceania, Africa and Americas collections atthe National Museums Scotland. She regularly works with indigenous artists both to commission work for the collections and in collaborative projects. Her most recent exhibition Extremes: Life in Subarctic Canada
was the result of a collaboration with the Tlicho community of the Northwest Territories in Canada. She is currently working with a number of Pacific artists on new works for the proposed new galleries in the Royal Museum to open in 2011.

Stephen Feeke: Unidentified Museum Objects
Feeke focuses on a display entitled ‘Unidentified Museum Objects: Curiosities from the British Museum’, an exhibition which brought together objects from diverse cultures and periods – linked only by the fact they couldn’t be categorised with any certainty. A ‘UMO’ could therefore be an item which was only partly understood or perhaps subject to continuous reassessment, or even one which had evaded all attempts to classify it. Looking again at the chosen items, Feeke re-examines the questions they raised about the relationship between objects and museums, between knowledge and looking. Does classification proscribe the imagination, for instance, so that a lack of knowledge is in fact liberating, inspirational and wonderful? Does the lack of a known function influence the way we look, and to what extent does uncertainty whet our visual appetite?

Stephen Feeke is a curator at the Henry Moore Institute where he is involved in all aspects of exhibition making and project management. He has done much to expand the geographical and temporal reach of the Institute’s programme and has developed a particular interest in the conceptual intersections between contemporary and historical art. Future projects include an exhibition of Ice Age sculpture and drawings by the Brazilian architect, Lina Bo Bardi.

Jeanne Cannizzo: Material Matters
Circulating some ‘dysfunctional’ archaeological objects from ancient Mexico, Cannizzo suggests ways of thinking about the tensions between the functional and the dysfunctional in material culture.

Jeanne Cannizzo is an anthropologist who teaches about material culture at the University of Edinburgh. She has also curated exhibitions for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; her latest show was Our Highland Home: Victoria and Albert in Scotland.

Dean Hughes: Aimlessness
Dean Hughes take’s a practical look at aimlessness.

Dean Hughes is an artist and Head of Intermedia at Edinburgh College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Schwarz weiss ausstellung, Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt and Presque Rein, Laure Genillard Gallery London. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at CUBE, Manchester;Dicksmith Gallery, London; Cairn, Pittenweem. He is currently working on a visual column for ArtReview magazine. He is represented by Dicksmith Gallery, London.

Alistair Rider: Claire Barclay’s Second Nature
In his short essay ‘The Destructive Character’, penned during the 1930s, Walter Benjamin accused the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie of cushioning themselves in soft, velvet-lined domestic interiors as protection from the destructive logic of their own socio-economic ventures. This talk is premised on the hypothesis that Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character’ is a type who is with us still, and that llives amongt us – within the ‘environmentally-conscious’ classes. After all, how else might we explain our predilection for filling our homes with genteel and ecologically-sound objects and natural materials? Do not these lifestyle purchases merely assist in easing our anguish at the knowledge of the environmental havoc wreaked by the fossil-fuelled economy which sustains us? Following from this, Rider will suggest that Claire Barclay’s dysfunctional objects subtly unsettle the well-ordered domesticity of the ecologically pious.

Alistair Rider is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, and lectures on post-war American art. He is writing a book on the poems and sculptures of Carl Andre which will be published next year by Phaidon. Currently he is researching the impact of ecological consciousness
on artists and critics in the late 1960s, and is planning a wide-ranging exploration of artists’ use of materials during the 1960s and 1970s.