VCRG :
Past Projects
Beauty
Visual Culture Research Group: Spring 2010
Lectures.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Get
it out with Optrex.
Spike Milligan Values
‘67
For over thirty years critical theory privileged
ideological issues of power, race, gender and class and was dubious
about the very concept of ‘beauty’. But there has been
a resurgence of interest in and discourse around the term. Dave
Hickey, for example, put an anti-academic
cat among the pigeons in 1993 with his Four
Essays on Beauty, cheerfully invoking
the democratizing energy of the art market’s taste for the
beautiful. Elaine Scarry
(2001) took a different tack, defending beauty by arguing for its
political efficacy in pressing us to a concern with justice. Wendy
Steiner (2001) brought a gendered awareness
to The Trouble with Beauty and Elizabeth
Prettejohn (2005), offering a theoretical
overview, joins her in calling for a nuanced reconfiguration of
the field while Roger Scruton (2009) wants a return to ‘universal
values’.
The debate is on, brought into sharp focus by Dave
Beech’s recent anthology on the
politics of beauty (Beauty,
2009) which repositions it as a central concern for visual culture.
Following Ricoeur, Beech calls for an ‘aesthetics of suspicion’
and highlights the contemporary status of beauty as a contested
category that can reveal the ideological position of individuals
and social discourse as well as the tensions between them.
This series of lectures will explore ways
in which beauty can be interpreted and understood from a variety
of different positions.
Thursday 6th May OA2 6.30pm
Paul Allen
Beauty in practice
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Through
a reconsideration of Robert Adams’ Beauty
in Photography: Essays in Defence of Traditional Values (1981),
Paul Allen examines how a well-formed image of a world heritage
site is no guarantee of ‘pleasing’ viewing. He argues
that beauty in landscape photography is more complex than a perfect
surface.
Paul Allen is programme leader of Photographic Practice at the Arts
University College at Bournemouth and a landscape photographer whose
work is concerned with questions of narrative, and the nature of
the photograph as academic knowledge.
Thursday 13th May OA2
6.30pm
Dr Elizabeth Prettejohn
Beauty Ancient and Modern; or, Why I am a Kantian
Why do we find the art of the past beautiful? The scholarly methods
of recent decades do not offer sophisticated ways of addressing
this question; in their emphasis on the differences among cultures
and cultural groups, they are unable to provide adequate analyses
of how artworks may communicate across cultural and temporal boundaries.
This lecture will take an extreme case, to ask how it is that we
can still find ancient sculpture beautiful. It will argue that the
insights of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790)
remain relevant for the study of the arts and humanities today.
Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of History
of Art at the University of Bristol. Her books include Beauty
and Art 1750-2000 (2005), Art for Art’s
Sake (2007), and The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites
(2000).
Thursday 20th May OA2
6.30pm
Dave Beech
Beauty, Ideology and Utopia
Dave Beech is a London Based British artist and writer. He is a
member of the collective Freee (www.freee.org.uk).
A regular contributor to Art Monthly as well as periodicals such
as Untitled, Mute and First Condition, he has examined the legacies
of the avant-garde in essays such as ‘Art’s Detractors’,
‘Shock versus Awe’ and ‘The politics of Beauty’.
He teaches at Chelsea College of Art and is the co-author of The
Philistine Controversy (2002).
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Study Day - Creativity and Commerce: The
Film Producer
Visual Culture Research Group - Director:
Dr Andrew Spicer, Reader in Cultural History
University of the West of England, Bristol School of Art, Media
and Design
Saturday May 6th 2006: Watershed
10.00 - 17.00
The aim of this study day is to analyse the misunderstood and
neglected role of the film producer and focus attention on the
collaborative nature of film-making. In the morning these issues
will be explored by Andrew Spicer
through a case study of Sydney Box,
one of the most important producers in the British film industry,
whose career spanned twenty-five years (1940-65). Andrew will
draw on Box's autobiography: The Lion That
Lost Its Way and Other Tales of the Show Business Jungle
which he has recently edited and his own study, Sydney
Box in the British Film Makers series
(Manchester University Press), which will be launched at the day.
In the afternoon Simon Relph
will talk about his experiences as a producer and as CEO of British
Screen, followed by a screening of The
Seventh Veil (1945), Box's most successful
film and the tenth top-grossing British films ever at the cinema
box-office
Timetable
10.00 - 10.30 Arrival
and Coffee
10.30 - 13.00 The Creative Producer Sydney
Box - A Case Study (film extracts;coffee
break)
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 15.00 Guest Speaker: Simon Relph
15.00 - 15.30 Coffee
15.30 - 17.05 Screening: The
Seventh Veil (Sydney Box, 1945)
The cost is £15.00 (waged) and £10.00 (unwaged). Places
are limited. To secure a place contact:
Watershed Box Office:
1 Canon's Road
Harbourside
Bristol
BS1 5TX;
 0117
927 5100
 info@watershed.co.uk
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Who’s the Author:
Confessions of a Screenwriter
Allan Cubitt
Watershed, 15 November 2006
Topics for Discussion
The nature of screenwriting
Differences from play or novel writing
The status of the screenwriter
Originator or collaborator?
Relations with other creative personnel (director, producer, actors,
cinematographer, set designer, composer)
Differences between writing for film
and television
Working practices
Status
Different production companies (BBC; ITV [Granada]; C4; Tiger
Aspect; Little Bird; Company Pictures; Box TV)
Adaptation
Fidelity to the original?
A creative interpretation?
Role of other creative personnel (director,
producer, actors, cinematographer, set designer, composer)(Anna
Karenina; The Hound of the Baskervilles)
Writing an original screenplay
Commissioned?
For specific actors? (Painted Lady)
Writing for established genre series
Formats/formulae
Agencies (Murphy’s Law)
Watershed Media Centre
1 Canon's Road
Harbourside
Bristol
BS1 5TX;
0117
927 5100
info@watershed.co.uk
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What is Visual Culture?
The Visual Culture Research Group, Bristol School of Art, Media
and Design, University of the West of England, invites you toa
series of three talks followed by discussion that aims to identify
and explore what defi nes Visual Culture as an academicdiscipline.
What are the particular aims, approaches, strategies and procedures
that constitute Visual Culture as a legitimate anddistinctive
fi eld of intellectual enquiry? Does Visual Culture have a particular
relationship to practice which shapes its activities?How does
it differ from Sociology or Cultural Studies? Do those differences
matter and, if so, in what ways?
8 November:
Critical Refl ections on the Nature of
Visual Culture
Ian Heywood,
artist and writer, until recently Reader in the Leeds School of
Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, author of Social
Theories of Art (1998) and editor (with
Barry Sandman)
of Interpreting Visual Culture (1998)
will launch this series of talks with a critical overview of recent
developments in Visual Culture since the famous October intervention
into its nature and identity. Drawing on his wide ranging experience
as a practising artist, social theorist and philosopher, his talk
will seek to situate Visual Culture within the complex overlapping
structure of contemporary academic disciplines with a view to
identifying its strengths and weaknesses in relation to a range
of practices that are often irreducible or resistant to theoretical
interrogation. It is this, the problematic relationship between
the visual, and the discourses available to address it, that is
a central theme in his current research and writing.
30 November:
Visual Culture or Art History?
Rose Cooper,
Undergraduate Portfolio Director for Media and Film at Sheffield
Hallam University, will discuss the history of Visual Culture
and its potential as an alternative way of conceptualising and
analysing visuality, contrasting its characteristic approaches
with those of Art History, Design History and Film Studies. Rose
will focus on ‘non western’ visual culture and transculturation
in exploring these issues.
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13 December:
Sexual Difference in Visual Culture: Methods
of Thinking About Difference.
Claire Pajaczkowska,
Reader in Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture in the School of Arts
and Education at Middlesex University and author of Feminist
Visual Culture (2000), will also explore
the vicissitudes of the emergence of Visual Culture from the bordering
fields of Art History, Design History, Film Studies and Cultural
Studies, a birth that has provoked strong feelings of antipathy
as well as exhilaration. In particular, how can new research into
the affective meaning of culture be related to the ‘hard’
data of traditional sociological and historical method? This has
conventionally been understood as one dimension of difference between
the sexes with the masculine methods of science overriding the feminine
concerns with feeling, meaning and interpretation. How is this sexual
difference to be understood within the ‘new’ discipline
of Visual Culture? Claire will discuss examples from fi lm, painting
and textiles.
Although each talk will be self-contained, we would encourage people
to attend all three and therefore participate in an ongoing dialogue
and debate.
 Download
the poster (pdf)
19.00-21.00 : 8 November, 30 November, 13
December 2006
Watershed Media Centre
1 Canon's Road
Harbourside
Bristol
BS1 5TX;
0117
927 5100
info@watershed.co.uk
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Predicaments in Visual Culture
A series of three symposia at the
Watershed, Bristol
Organised by Dept. of Visual Culture Bristol
School of Art, Media and Design, U.W.E.
January - March 2005
Visible and Invisible Culture January
22
Theorising Creativity February
19
Mediated Pleasures in (post)feminist Contexts
March 19
Nine years after October published responses to a questionnaire
on the value of Visual Culture as a field of study, its position
within the academy remains uncertain. Occupying spaces in between
existing disciplinary sites, Visual Culture might usefully be
described as a series of tactics enabling cross-disciplinary modes
of enquiry and investigation of cultural forms that cuts across
more established areas of study. Taking this form of analytic
mobility as its starting point, the ‘Predicaments in Visual
Culture’ series addresses a number of contemporary cultural
concerns and in so doing raises questions about the status of
Visual Culture both as a still emerging academic field and as
set of strategies to interrogate the complexities of visuality.
Each of the one-day symposia, although adopting different perspectives,
share a desire to consider the ways in which contemporary art, media
and design practices, industrial production and active modes of
consumption together demand a re-evaluation of the nature and place
of the central tenets of Visual Culture. By thus shifting the emphasis
away from the conception of Visual Culture as yet another mode of
reception and reading, it is hoped that a fuller engagement with
the production of visual meaning will signal a shift to a mode of
theorising that is more responsive to emergent patterns of visuality,
creativity and political praxis.
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Implicit in this series is a suspicion
that the areas of debate which initially gave rise to Visual Culture
as a discipline have “stalled” in the last decade. These
symposia are an opportunity to re-energise them by moving beyond
established arguments and positions, challenging distinctions between
theory and practice, re-thinking the nature of interdisciplinarity
and re-assessing the possibility of critical and political thinking
particularly within the context of recent debates around gender,
identity and difference.
Predicaments in Visual Culture
Programme
Saturday 22nd January 2005 - Visible
and Invisible Culture
Saturday 19th February 2005 - Theorising
Creativity
Saturday 19th March 2005 - Mediated Pleasures
in (Post)Feminist Contexts
09.30am Delegate registration – tea/coffee
10.00am Conference welcome
Keynote Paper and discussion
10.45am Break – tea/coffee
11.00am Session One:
Four Papers and discussion
13.00pm Lunch
14.00pm Session Two:
Four Papers and discussion
16.00pm Break - tea/coffee
16.15pm Plenary Session
17.15pm Finish
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