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Oxford and Nottingham

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Patrick Keiller Bibliography

September 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

 

Patrick Keiller bibliography

Keiller, Patrick:”Imaging” in Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (eds): Restless Cities (London: Verso, 2010), pp.139-154.

Keiller, Patrick: “Landscape and Cinematography”, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2009, pp.409-414; http://cgj.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/16/3/409

Keiller, Patrick: “Popular Science” in Anthony Kiendl (ed.): Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary Culture (London: Black Dog, 2008), pp. 32-37.

Keiller, Patrick: “Urban Space and Early Film” in Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (eds): Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London, New York: Wallflower, 2008), pp. 29-39.

Unwin, Richard: review of The City of the Future, BFI Southbank Gallery, in Frieze 114, April 2008; http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/patrick_keiller

Dillon, Brian: review of The City of the Future, BFI Southbank Gallery, London in Modern Painters, March 2008, pp.84-85.

Keiller, Patrick: “Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film” in Matthew Beaumont, Michael Freeman (eds): The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble (Oxford etc: Peter Lang, 2008), pp.69-84.

Hanks, Robert: review of The City of the Future in The Independent Extra, 22 November 2007, pp.14-15; http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/a-cinematic-show-puts-a-new-twist-on-historical-perception-765004.html

Keiller, Patrick: feature article in Time Out, 21 November 2007, p.67; http://www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/3841/patrick-keiller-interview.html

Keiller, Patrick:”Phantom Rides”, The Guardian Review, 10 November 2007, p.14; http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/nov/10/2

Hardingham, Samantha and Rattenbury, Kester: Supercrit #1: Cedric Price Potteries Thinkbelt (Abingdon: Routledge 2007), pp.110-111.

Walker, Ian: So Exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp.160-186.

Keiller, Patrick: “Londres, Bombay” in Vertigo Vol. 3 No. 6 Summer 2007, pp. 38-39, 42-23.

Keiller, Patrick: “Film as Spatial Critique” in Mark Dorrian, Murray Fraser, Jonathan Hill, Jane Rendell (eds): Critical Architecture (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), pp.115-123.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The City of the Future’ in Alan Burton, Laraine Porter (eds): Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007), pp.104-112, abridged at http://www.bftv.ac.uk/newslet/0304p3.htm

Anderson, Jason: “London Mapping: Patrick Keiller’s Peripatetic Hybrids”, interview with Patrick Keiller, Cinema Scope 26, 2006.

Keiller, Patrick:”Coal Hopper, Nine Elms Lane, ” in Iain Sinclair (ed): London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), pp.292-295.

Burke, Andrew: “Nation, Landscape and Nostalgia in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space”, Historical Materialism 14:1, 2006, pp.3-29; http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/hm/2006/00000014/00000001

Connarty, Jane; Lanyon, Josephine and others: Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video (Bristol: Picture This, 2006), pp.106-109.

Mazierska, Ewa & Rascaroli, Laura: Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp.57-78.

Dave, Paul: Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2006), pp.119-140.

Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2006), pp.38, 46-47.

Pile, Steve: Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London: Sage, 2005), pp.4-12.

Keiller, Patrick: “Motion Pictures”, The Guardian Review, 21 May 2005, pp.18-19; http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/may/21/2

House, John & Keiller, Patrick: “River of Dreams”, Tate Etc. 3 (Spring 2005), pp.100-107; http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue3/riverofdreams.htm

Demorgon, Laurence: “Robinson, pélerin du monde global”, “Architecture d’aujourdhui“350, January-February 2005, pp.24-25.

Keiller, Patrick: “Tram Rides and Other Virtual Landscapes” in Simon Popple, Patrick Russell, Vanessa Toulmin (eds): The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, (London: BFI, 2004), pp.191-200.

Mayer, Robert: “Not Adaptation but Drifting : Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16:4, July 2004, pp.803-827; http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1721&context=ecf

Misselwitz, Philipp: “Reichtmer im Zerfall”, interview with Patrick Keiller in Philipp Oswalt (ed): Schrumpfende Städte, (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), pp.554-559; English edition 2006, pp.554-559.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The City of the Future’ in City 7:3, November 2003, pp.376-386.

Dillon, Brian: ‘London Calling’, interview with Patrick Keiller in Frieze 78, October 2003, pp.78-81 http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/london_calling/

O’Pray, Michael: Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (London, New York: Wallflower, 2003), pp.107-118.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘London in the Early 1990s’ in Andrew Gibson and Joe Kerr (eds): London from Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion, 2003), pp.353-361 and AA Files 49: London: Postcolonial City (London: Architectural Association, 2003), pp.20-24.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘London-Rochester-London’ in Cedric Price and others: Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2003), pp.168-185.

O’Neill, Eithne: London and Robinson in Space review in Positif 509/510 (July/August 2003), p.138.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’ and ‘Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape’ reprinted in Nina Danino & Michael Mazière (eds): The Undercut Reader (London, New York: Wallflower, 2003), pp.75-83, 204-208.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Sexual Ambiguity and Automotive Engineering’ in Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr (eds): Autopia (London: Reaktion, 2002), pp.342-353.

Evans, Gareth: The Dilapidated Dwelling review in Time Out (8-15 May 2002); http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/65464/the-dilapidated-dwelling.html

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Architectural Cinematography’ in Kester Rattenbury (ed): This Is Not Architecture (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.37-44.

Martin-Jones, David: interview with Patrick Keiller, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 5-2002, pp.123-132.

Keiller, Patrick: The Robinson Institute, eBook in series Species of Spaces for diffusion.org.uk, 2002; http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=62

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Port Statistics’ in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, Alicia Pivaro (eds): The Unknown City (Cambridge MA, London: MIT, 2001), pp.442-458.

Eisner, Ken: The Dilapidated Dwelling review in Variety, December 18-31, 2000; http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117796949.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

Bruzzi, Stella: New Documentary: a critical introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.99-123.

Dave, Paul: ‘Representations of Capitalism, History and Nation in the Work of Patrick Keiller’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds): British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.339-351.

Smith, Claire: ‘New Art Cinema in the 90s’, in Robert Murphy (ed): British Cinema in the ’90s (London: BFI, 2000), pp.145-155.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Popular Science’, in Landscape (London: British Council, 2000), pp.60-67.

Kerr, Joe: interview with Patrick Keiller in Bob Fear (ed): Architecture + Film II, Architectural Design, 70:1, January 2000, pp.82-85.

Keiller, Patrick: Robinson in Space and a Conversation with Patrick Wright (London: Reaktion Books, 1999).

Richard Wentworth’s Thinking Aloud (London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1998), p.33.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ in Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till (eds): The Everyday and Architecture, Architectural Design 68:7-8, 1998, pp.22-27.

Dave, Paul: ‘The Bourgeois Paradigm and Heritage Cinema’, New Left Review 224, July-August 1997, pp.111-126; http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=1914

Barwell, Claire: interview with Patrick Keiller, Pix 2, 1997, pp.158-165.

Sinclair, Iain: Lights Out For the Territory (London: Granta, 1997), pp.306-317.

Sorensen, Colin: interview with Patrick Keiller, London on Film (London: Museum of London, 1996), pp.160-161.

Daniels, Stephen: “Paris Envy: Patrick Keiller’s London“, History Workshop Journal, 40:1, 1995, pp.220-222; http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/40/1/220

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Tourist Poem’, Umeni XLIII:1-2, UDU AVCR, Prague, 1995, pp.45-47.

Price, Anna: interview with Patrick Keiller, Artifice 1, 1994, pp.26-37.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Visible Surface’, Sight and Sound, November 1994, p.35.

Keiller, Patrick: 1994 Berlin Film Festival programme text for London, reprinted as ‘Filming London Obliquely’, Regenerating Cities 7, 1994, pp.54-55.

Sinclair, Iain: ‘Necropolis of Fretful Ghosts’, Sight and Sound, June 1994, pp.12-15.

The British Art Show 1990 (London: South Bank Centre, 1990), pp.76-77, 134.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia 1919-1939’, published as ‘Czech Perspective’, Building Design, 13 March 1987, pp.22-25.

O’Pray, Michael: review of Norwood, Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1984, pp.322-323.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape’, in Undercut 7-8, 1983, pp.125-129.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’, in Undercut 3-4, 1982, pp.42-48.

see also:

http://www.rca.ac.uk/patrickkeiller

http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com

 

Track abstract

May 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Track: Metaphors and a sense of belonging in a networked field of vision.

Blewbury Postcards by EWB pre-1945

Abstract:
Does the viewing and deployment of traditional art practices within augmented reality locative multimedia applications alter the relationship between creator, viewer and traditional notions of an artistic sense of place?
TRACK is a multimedia/fine arts project which examines the wider implications of disrupting conventional fine art notions of landscape by using pervasive media on location in a particular area loaded with art historical and poetical signifiers. Through art practice and research in local history archives it will examine how the disruption of traditional modes of ‘confined’ or ‘static’ viewing may subvert or divert traditional fine art practice and historical explication. This will be contrasted with traditional literary conventions of a sense of place.
Drawing on contemporary new media and locative arts practice and theory especially Coyne’s ‘Tuning of Place’ (Coyne, order 2010) and Kieller’s ‘City of The Future’ (Kieller BFI, viagra 2008) this paper investigates notions of ‘english rural idyll’ ‘mythopoeic’ and ‘place-myth’ (Shields, 1991) in the creation of a specific Berkshire artist’s retreat (The Blewbury Artists, 1880-1999). It will examine how this may be re-conceived or re-investigated through a pervasive media ‘lens’. This is a work in progress and conclusions will be gathered from extensive field-testing of devices and further local history archival investigation.
The presentation will deliver findings so far and make tentative conclusions.

Keywords: Place-myth, mythopoeic, artist’s colonies, hand-held devices, pervasive media, place, landscape painting, drawing, land-writing, deep mapping.

What is Rural Symposium: report

March 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Photo: Nick May from Food Chain Exhibition

These observations base on notes taken on day. Thoroughly enjoyable but as notes reveal patchy.

Full website here : http://www.thecollaborators.org.uk/What_is_Rural.html

Steve Messam: Site-specific public artist
First speaker was standing in for Ian Hunter from Littoral.

Site-specific ‘sculpture’ mostly financed by business and aimed at the spectacular rather than the sublime.
To me suffered from the ’roundabout art’ disease that aflicts much ‘public art’ i.e. it grand and spectacular bit like a firework display to draw attention to itself and satisfy the ‘sponsors’ but as actual art almost non-existent. Mr. Messam was genuinely concerned with local issues and genuinely believes he not only drawing down significant wads of sponsorship but also highlighting important issues. At time there some depth as in his sheep pen covered in hides but mostly it looked like big buck = big bang art and the actual art almost irrelevant…i.e. why not fireworks and be done with it?

EMMA HEALD: Advisor for Natural England
Good overview of Natural England remit and challenges in current economic climate. Little direct relationship to arts it seemed.

LIZ and PAUL GENEVER: Farmer
Excellent grounded non-academic highlighting of real issues affecting modern farming. Learnt something…

TALKSCAPE exhibition: KATE GENEVER and ADAM O’MEARA

Kate had been instrumental in bringing symposium together drawing on twin background in farming and the arts.

I found actual show confusing and the noble aspiration of rehanging it did not really help give a sense of artists in it. I reserve judgement and Adam’s drawings appeared interesting.


JOHN PLOWMAN: DAVID GILBERT: ROSALIND STODDART

Three speakers round table. Not very enlightening and revealed more about the scarcity of funding post ACE.
Plowman safely berthed in academia and as with all three there an almost missionary zeal to ‘bring’ art to the poor downtrodden masses or as in Norfolk these days Bankers in 4X4s. None seemed to exist in real world at all compared to the farmer.

Indeed it could be argued that projects like Beacon are actually part of the problem not the solution for rural communities if they actually still exist. The proportion of residents actually living in coastal holiday towns and villages is below 40%. No number of art interventions or decorative arts galleries can hide that. I was irritated by the religious opportunism of ‘metropolitan’ minds who without hesitation believe ‘rural’ people need a site-specific application or another dubious alter-modern happening. I was not the only one who felt this.

Top-down not bottom up attitudes despite the conviction by the instigators/curators (and funding recipients) that they doing just that…naive in extreme and very Old Labour approach..i.e. throw culture at masses they will like it…..now as empty as the towns they tried to save……

Sarcastic footnote: Stoddart calls herself an INDEPENDENT CULTURAL ENGINEER..this cuts no ice with me and just shows the ego inflation prevelent these days in the sector…..curators ten a penny so I suppose this cultural re-branding..god help us

DAVID WALKER-BARKER: Artist

Old-school approach (Royal College) actually made beautiful artworks and had a significant practice founded on genuine knowledge and a historic sense of place and history. Note I have to highlight this as this kind of work few and far between these days!

TIM NEAL: Anthropologist (Wildsite and Tourism)
Wild card literally and at time seemed a little out of place but in hindsght the area which actually provoked most interest for me.
Instead of art practice buffoonery we had some fairly in depth analysis of what actually made people consider places as ‘rural idylls’ from Samuel Palmer on. His observations of English in France chimed perfectly with my experience on the ground in NORTH NORFOLK.
The images of ‘rural myth’ created by artists are along with curators above seriously implicated in the destruction of viable healthy rural communities. To wander through a pitch dark rural idyll as second home owners and holiday properties lay empty is to experience first-hand the effect of rural gentrification. Abstract pontificating or arty musings do not hide this desperate state of affairs.

The rural landscape is an increasingly depopulated picture-postcard manned by the modern swains i.e. transient workers and illegal immigrants. They if employed in something more than service industries man increasingly ruthless mass food production facilities which hidden from the Range-Rovers gaze by screens of trees.

NICK MAY: FOOD CHAIN EXHIBITION

The following exhibition of farm workers in 21st century brilliantly spotlighted this and suggested that the true artform of the modern era is documentary photography as nothing else is keeping pace with the destruction of rural values.

http://www.skegnessinternational.com/nick-may.html

New RPT Practice: Original Project Proposal (amended March 2011)

March 16, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Having realised that original proposal had become over-complicated I have returned to original short proposal.

This then is a slightly amended version of that original idea. Basically I wish to revisit exact locations where I drew a series of landscapes around my Oxfordshire hometown in the early 1990’s.

https://shaunbelcher.com/archive/art/landscape.htm

Blewburton Hill Oxfordshire 1991

Using an as yet unpurchased Android slate.

I will draw on tablet from exact previous location and then merge either in adobe or through a purpose built android app. with original drawing and a photograph of the view. There is also the multimedia option of engaging with text and music too.

If this successful I will then take on to a more ‘public’ version of app. Posibly launched through an exhibition at local art centre. This however I will remove from the proposal timeline and place after the July 2012 M.A. deadline.

 

Here original proposal (amended March 2011)

M.A. RPT 2010-12
METAPHORS AND A SENSE OF BELONGING IN A NETWORKED FIELD OF VISION

A project focusing on site specific experimental multidisciplinary artworks merging traditional notions of practice with digital media,computation, and internet resources”

Multimedia – incorporating fine art and literary practice

The project is centred on site specific locations – a local art centre, an abandoned railway track (now a public thoroughfare) and a large area of downland previously documented in the 1990’s. The project will involve drawing/painting on a handheld device and access to internet resources specifically GPS locative applications.

I aim to draw together my multidisciplinary activities in one specific outcome. This may be an exhibition tied in with locative media that may involve public engagement depending on timeframe.

 

 

Regional Literary Cutures and Modernism: University of Nottingham Conference 2011

November 24, 2010 / / 0 Comments

http://www.humanitiescentral.com/regional-literary-cultures-modernism/

Paper sub­mis­sions of 20 min­utes are invited for this one-day post­grad­u­ate con­fer­ence hosted by the Cen­tre for Regional Lit­er­a­ture and Cul­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Not­ting­ham on 14 April 2011. The event will be fol­lowed by a one-day sym­po­sium of invited speak­ers,  includ­ing Prof. Patrick McGuin­ness (Uni­ver­sity of Oxford), Prof. Andrew Thacker (De Mont­fort Uni­ver­sity), and Dr Nadine Holdsworth (Uni­ver­sity of Warwick).

Recent crit­i­cal work on region­al­ism in lit­er­a­ture has sought to reassess both its scope and its con­tin­u­ing impor­tance over the course of the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­turies. For instance, Scott Her­ring has recently empha­sised ‘the impor­tance of local­ity to modernism’s world-imaginary’, echo­ing Ray­mond Williams’s call for the equa­tion between mod­ernism and the met­ro­pol­i­tan to be reassessed.

This col­lo­ca­tion of local­ity and moder­nity can be seen in the fic­tions of, among oth­ers, D.H. Lawrence, Storm Jame­son, George Moore, Caradoc Evans, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Lewis Gras­sic Gib­bon. Even James Joyce’s Ulysses derives its cos­mo­log­i­cal uni­ver­sal­ism from a micro­scopic atten­tion to the local details of its provin­cial urban set­ting. In the post-war period, the cur­rency of regional themes in British fic­tion is appar­ent in nov­els by writ­ers like Alan Sil­li­toe, Muriel Spark, Ray­mond Williams, Gra­ham Swift, Pat Barker, and Jim Crace.

A sim­i­lar rich­ness of inter­ests in ideas of place and intra-national iden­ti­ties can be found in the late mod­ernist poetry of Hugh Mac­Di­armid, David Jones, and Basil Bunting, and Patrick Kavanagh’s advo­cacy of the ‘poetry of the parish’ has also had a wide and last­ing influ­ence. Regional themes, set­tings, and dialects strongly colour the work of Ted Hughes, R.S. Thomas, George Mackay Brown, Paul Mul­doon, Gillian Clarke, and Roy Fisher, amongst many oth­ers. In the work of a younger gen­er­a­tion of poets and nov­el­ists there is a strik­ing con­ver­gence between local expe­ri­ence and the pres­sure of inter­na­tional con­texts and relations.

British and Irish drama saw a resur­gence of local pride at the start of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. From 1904, the act­ing and play-writing ener­gies of Dublin’s Abbey The­atre were emu­lated by a num­ber of other regional reper­tory the­atres in Man­ches­ter, Birm­ing­ham, Liv­er­pool, Glas­gow, and Belfast. And in recent years, com­pa­nies includ­ing The­atre Work­shop, Druid, Knee­high, and Field Day have attempted to stage work that speaks to audi­ences away from the usual cen­tres of the­atri­cal power and influence.

It will be the pur­pose of this sym­po­sium to explore the vari­ety and diver­sity of expres­sions given to region­al­ism in British and Irish lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture dur­ing the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­turies, with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis upon mod­ernism and its after-effects. Con­trib­u­tors are also encour­aged to con­sider the inter­sec­tions and con­ver­sa­tions that occur between region­al­ism, nation­al­ism, inter­na­tion­al­ism, and cosmopolitanism.

Con­firmed Keynote Speak­ers:
Prof. Luke Gib­bons (NUI Maynooth)
Prof. Dominic Head (Uni­ver­sity of Nottingham)

We would there­fore wel­come papers on a wide vari­ety of themes and top­ics, such as:
• The loca­tions of mod­ernism
• Regional lit­er­ary geo­gra­phies
• Region­al­ism, form, and lan­guage
• Arch­i­pel­agic rela­tions and the cul­tures of the ‘Four Nations’
• Gen­der and regional iden­tity
• Writ­ing, read­ing, and the poet­ics of place
• Region­al­ism and glob­al­i­sa­tion
• The pol­i­tics of regional cul­tures
• Crit­i­cal genealo­gies of ‘region­al­ism’
• Map­ping and cul­tural car­togra­phies
• The phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of the ‘local’
• ‘Parochial­ism’ and ‘provin­cial­ism’ in con­tem­po­rary writing

Please sub­mit an abstract of 300 words to neal.alexander@nottingham.ac.uk by 28th Jan­u­ary 2011, ensur­ing that you include the fol­low­ing details: your name; your affil­i­a­tion; your email address; the title of your paper.

We are also able to offer one bur­sary of £100 towards the costs of fees, travel, and accom­mo­da­tion for the con­fer­ence. If you wish to apply for this bur­sary, please also sub­mit a state­ment of 500 words explain­ing how your cur­rent research engages with the themes of the con­fer­ence. This should also arrive no later than 28th Jan­u­ary 2011.

The con­fer­ence fee will be £50 for both days. Please note that this does not include accommodation.
Related Posts

* Styl­is­tics across disciplines
* Bridg­ing the Gaps, Mind­ing the Context
* Spaces of Alter­ity: Con­cep­tu­al­is­ing Counter-Hegemonic Sites, Prac­tices and Narratives
* Lan­guage, Lit­er­a­ture and Cul­tural Poli­cies – Cen­tres and (Ex-) Centricities

Regional Modernism?

November 24, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Accessed 24.11.2010
http://gradworks.umi.com/32/72/3272054.html

Regional modernism: The vanishing landscape in American literature and culture, 1896–1952
(Sarah Orne Jewett,  Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison)

by Shimotakahara, Leslie, PhD, BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2007, 0 pages; 3272054

Abstract: For traditional literary criticism, the term ‘Regional Modernism’ no doubt represents a contradiction in terms. By idealizing communities tied to the soil, regional fiction gratifies the tastes of urban middle-class readerships that could still imagine their origins in this kind of locale at the fin-de-siècle. Modernism, by sharp contrast, addresses an international readership detached from any soil or homeland. Coining the term ‘regional modernism’ is my way of suggesting that, during the early twentieth century, major American novelists appropriated the language of regionalism and reworked it by means of aesthetic strategies we now characterize as modernist. Modernism simultaneously offers the reader a sense of experience specific to an American place and yet renders that place a phantasm that an individual carries within his consciousness. Beginning with Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, I argue that this famous regional novel acknowledges a problem in representing a place of origins: as rural New England is flooded by mass culture, it loses its semblance as a unique folk culture and thus its ability to designate origins. The next chapter considers how Wharton’s The House of Mirth imagines a high culture distinct and apart from the economy as a means of resurrecting the culture of ‘Old New York’ that mass culture effaced. Turning to The Professor’s House, I show how Cather seeks a form of aesthetic compensation for the way that conspicuous consumption disfigures the Midwest. She creates a purely imaginary landscape that her protagonist contains within his head as a fantasy of the primitive origins of universal man. My next chapter proposes that Faulkner appropriates this method in Absalom! Absalom! to represent the South as the white nation’s authentic identity. His fiction collaborates with a sociological school called the ‘New Regionalism’ in mystifying the South’s economic history of slave labor and remaking it as an organic folk culture. The dissertation concludes by asking what an African-American writer has to do to write as a modernist. I argue that Invisible Man seizes on cosmopolitan modernism’s stereotype of the African as nature incarnate and reshapes it into a black subject characterized by unique individuality.

Advisor: Armstrong, Nancy
School: BROWN UNIVERSITY
Source: DAI-A 68/07, p. 2947, Jan 2008
Source Type: DISSERTATION
Subjects: American literature
Publication Number: 3272054

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 55, Number 1, Spring 2009

E-ISSN: 1080-658X Print ISSN: 0026-7724

DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1596
Afterword:
Regional Modernism and Transnational Regionalism
Marjorie Pryse

At the 2002 Modernist Studies Association Fourth Annual Conference, several of us participated in a seminar titled “Regionalism and the Modern.”1 In the discussion that revolved around previously shared position papers, seminar participants considered the idea that regionalism allows modernism to be understood as a crisis of definition. The seminar developed the idea of modernism as a process of layering—in space, of regions; in the social world, of identities; and in narrative, of time—a sedimentation that excavates the regionalist bedrock of the modern text. Earlier in the conference we had listened to Simon Gikandi note (in his plenary talk “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism”) that “the process of developing categories in modernity depends on the purification of categories.” He argued that modernism derives its energy from the “other,” but that the institutions of modernism “separate out and ‘tame’ the sources” of that very energy, as when museums of modern art categorize African art as “primitive” instead of as integral to the history of art. For Gikandi, the region of Africa creates an epiphany of “what the ‘other’ is for the moderns.” Modernism becomes transnational when Gikandi explores the relationship between regional—African—art and modernism. At the same time, modernism becomes regional, and the challenge to modernism becomes one of including heterogeneity and global regions in its categories. [End Page 189]

Accessed: 24.11.2010
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v055/55.1.pryse.html

James B. Thompson: Painting as a verb

November 24, 2010 / / 0 Comments


Review: James B. Thompson’s ‘painting’ as a verb at Hallie Ford Museum in Salem
Frank Miller, capsule Willamette University

http://www.willamette.edu/cla/arts/faculty/thompson/index.php

Accessed: 24.11.2010

James B. Thompson, treat “Swale,” 2008, acrylic on canvas.

As painters immersed in the 20th century’s abstract revolution stopped painting things that looked like things, several interesting things happened.

First, art — or this type of art — relinquished its sense of place. Even if the artist was thinking about a mountain or a street corner or a pillow on a bed, there was no mountain or corner or pillow to be seen. Impressionists fuzzed up the landscape. Cubists diced it and reassembled it in funny ways. Abstract artists packed it in a steamer trunk and sent it off on a one-way voyage to Yesterdayland.

Second, space became intellectual, not actual. Painting had always been an illusionary act – how can we fool the eye into seeing what we want it to see? — but now the illusion was that spatial relationships as we ordinarily think of them didn’t exist. Artists such as Mondrian and Klee were consumed with the idea of how space works – they could be downright mathematical about it – but they produced a geometry, not a landscape, and it was a geometry of the mind. (As a side benefit, abstraction also strengthened realist painting, because for the first time serious painters had to ask themselves why they were painting realistically, and then either come up with a good answer or start doing something else.)

Third, painting became accidental. Yes, Jackson Pollock had ideas in mind, and no, not every one of his drip paintings worked the way he wanted it to. But the chance of the throw became a central aspect of the process. It was the I Ching-ing of the art.

Except.

As abstraction became less a revolutionary act and more a way of approaching art – in other words, as it matured it also opened up. It could be about all sorts of things, including landscape or whatever else was in the artist’s mind, whether anyone looking at the finished product realized it or not. And that’s an interesting question: If viewers don’t know there’s a level of thought below the surface of the paint, how can they tell what they’re seeing?

The paintings and prints in “The Vanishing Landscape,” James B. Thompson’s exhibition that continues through May 17 at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, raise precisely that issue. They’re ravishing things, especially the paintings — the sort of work that people like to call eye candy, although that’s a curiously dismissive way to think about art: What’s wrong with pleasing the eye, especially if you’re also doing other things at the same time? And Thompson’s art does a lot of other things, even if you’re only thinking about its surfaces. It’s a considered and sophisticated grappling with matters of space, color and mark-making — the difference, you might almost say, between a mar and a mark.

Underneath those lovely surfaces, marring is very much on Thompson’s mind. A native Chicagoan, Thompson has been on the art faculty at Willamette University in Salem since 1986, and he’s come to think of himself very much as a Westerner. What he sees, as he puts it in his artist statement for this show, is the transformation and disappearance of the region’s landscape “as planned developments, agribusiness and even golf resorts replace small town life, rural communities, family farms and forests.”

The tradition of landscape painting doesn’t deal adequately with the disappearance of land, he believes: Instead, it tends to depict idealized, unsullied evocations of what remains, so that we see a romanticized pastoral dream instead of the radically altered reality. A long tradition in photography has witnessed and recorded the sometimes brutal reshaping of the land, and representational painters such as Michael Brophy have tackled the issue of land use and abuse head-on.

But Thompson seems to want something at once deeper and more subtle — a philosophical undercurrent that transforms the act of artmaking into a reflection of the way we change the land. “The method of rendering abstract paintings and prints,” he writes, “is a celebration of the very act of change since this creative process involves the kind of continual mark-making that generates new sets of problems on the surface of each piece.”

In other words, you make marks – on the canvas or the land – and each mark is a risk. After all, the landscape of small towns and family farms that Thompson laments in passing was itself a reshaping of an earlier landscape far less decided by human intervention; one that might itself have been lamented as it faded before the ax and plow. So you think out each step, varying your mark-making according to some sort of loose plan, and you aim to come out with something beautiful. You don’t destroy the canvas. Chance, in the Pollock sense, is part of it. But instead of a big burst – a strip-mining of the image – it’s a considered improvisation, like good chamber jazz, each change partly determining what the next change will be.

How do Thompson’s paintings and prints emerge from this philosophical improvisation? Well, they’re gorgeous – and gorgeous in a way that invites repeated looking, because the more you look, the more you see. That’s a bit like looking, really looking, at the land.

The show’s 14 paintings, which range from about 2 feet square to 3 feet by 5 feet, are acrylic on canvas, and they’re richly layered, with a thick surface shine that makes them look almost like brightly fired ceramic tile. Yet they’re also nubbled, mottled like leather, with a suggestion of rises and hollows, or of something granular, like dirt. Their color is immediate, deep, voluble, seductive: oranges, reds, blues and greens that shout out their identities. Streaks, marks, splotches, running fences, finely scratched swirls like calligraphy, viewed in a certain frame of mind, seem topographical. It’s as if you’re seeing a landscape from an overflying airplane: lakes, rivers, roads, rises, habitations. The two dozen smaller intaglio prints are less deeply saturated in color but more significantly and lavishly marked, and at times they seem almost biological, in a microscopic way: They increase the illusion of some sort of exotic map-making.

Thompson suggests his underlying concerns through his titles: “Prairie,” “Wetland, “Aquifer,” “Range,” “Ridge,” “Karst” and the like. Yet the question remains: Does the viewer get any of these connections from looking at the art? You can easily view these prints and paintings and appreciate them as beautifully executed works that are simply about themselves. They’re abstracts – question marks. And their beauty raises another question: Are they, then, any less romanticized about the state of the land than the traditional landscapes Thompson finds so misleading?

Perhaps an answer lies in Thompson’s sense of movement, of making marks that lead to other marks in a dance of continuing small decisions. It’s a way of thinking about how we interact with the rest of the world, and it applies to intereactions far beyond canvas and paper. It’s “painting” as a verb, not as a noun. And it’s how we paint – how we make our marks – that makes the difference.

— Bob Hicks

Paintmap! Spanish guys got there first…

November 23, 2010 / / 0 Comments

http://www.paintmap.com

Such an obvious idea not surprised this already exists but done very well and with full google support looks like rather than a hack.

Now it remains to be seen whether these guys will let me somehow manipulate/interact with images. The screenshot below shows no activity in the area of railway track I chosen so it remains a blank canvas so to speak. maybe I can configure my own APP to both work with and display separately from the paintmap one.

I have also contacted Google with idea – leaning more to a ‘contained’ and ‘curated’ version which is what I will have to do now the worldwide one exists. Seen quite a few steet art ‘curated’ versions as obviously straight photography of graffitti can be located direct on google maps/earth.

Initial concept – Anglocana?

October 26, 2010 / / 0 Comments

The project is centred on a site specific location which involves a local art centre (Cornerstone Didcot Oxfordshire), an abandoned railway track (now a public thoroughfare) and internet resources specifically GPS locative applications on handheld devices.

I aim to draw together my multidisciplinary activities in one specific outcome. This will be an exhibition tied in with locative media that will involve public engagement in producing new artworks through GPS drawing.

Users will use handheld internet connected devices to both read and create interaction during the event.

Delineation of ‘Theory’: An artist’s statement

I was recently asked to pen an Artist’s Statement and the following draws on that article.

Shaun Belcher November 2009

I am a somewhat unusual case to be writing about my ‘fine art’ practice. I began life ‘post-Hornsey College of Art’ in 1981 having successfully gained a place on the Royal College M.A. in Painting but sadly was not so successful in terms of funding. I continued as a painter and printmaker until a move to Edinburgh in 1993. There I became a published poet. A return to Oxford in 1996 then saw a period of fine art mixed with song-writing.

In conventional terms this kind of genre-hopping is frowned upon as not being quite serious enough. Thankfully I have enough USA based models to not worry too much about that e.g. Musician and Architect and Fine Artist Terry Allen to name but one influence. However whatever my ‘practice’ entailed throughout this period one thing remained constant. My commitment and seriousness about what I was depicting in whatever medium.

Throughout my ‘art-working’ life some things have remained stubbornly, one might even say obsessively’, constant. Be it in digital images as recently or in drawing or poetry and song I have remained constant in delineating a clearly ‘map-able’ terrain. This terrain extends about 5 to 20 miles in radius of my hometown of Didcot in Oxfordshire, England. Always the poor relation of the illustrious centre of learning that resides but a stones throw away.

There runs a hard core of intention throughout which draws on politics, ecological thinking and that obsessive returning to notions of ‘place’ and ‘landscape’. I regard my work as being a mapping of constant themes which recur sometimes years later. The River Thames is one theme the Berkshire Downs another. Local folk tales and oral literature mined from local libraries another. A recent song ‘Hanging Puppet’ drew on one such ‘tale. In fact one could describe it as artistic ‘Anglocana’ to differentiate it from Americana. I have written well over 2000 songs over the years..Mostly these are recorded in lo-fi versions and only really coming to life when in the hands of other more talented musicians (see the Moon Over the Downs CD 2003). Poetry has appeared in various magazines and in the Scottish anthology The Ice Horses (1996). I currently have at least 4 unpublished complete books of poetry on the shelf. One could describe my work as multi-disciplinary with a strong streak of green politics colouring the waters beneath.

I have drawn on some clear influences in writing and art. Seamus Heaney’s concept of a personal ‘Hedge School’ going back to John Clare is one thread. My forebear’s personal involvement in Agricultural Unions is another (see Skeleton at the Plough poems). I also am influenced by a ‘working class’ sense of writing picked up from Carver and Gallagher and other dirty realists. In song almost any Americana act would suffice. I am not American but I have strong American influences going back to Thoreau and Walden lake. To try and build an alternative ‘English’ approach I have increasingly been drawn back to the English Civil War when the notions of science and arts were more fluid and interchangeable. I have recently purchased a reproduction of Robert Plot’s Oxford a marvellous Natural History of Oxfordshire from 1677. In it one finds specimens such as ‘Stones that look like Horses’…wonderful….

It is this kind of merging of scientific natural history and folk-lore terminology that I now most interested in. Both in poetry (see Downland Ballads) and artworks (see TRACK..2009)

So how does theory inform my practice? Well I see no distinction between the various arts. I am widely read in poetry and song and that informs my practice whatever I do. At times I have also used cartooning as an ‘art criticism’ vehicle as well as penning many art review pieces. I regard both theory and practice as being essential parts of art education and indeed my own life-long learning. One would not exist without the other.

One needs time to absorb and think not just create. I return again and again to my greatest teachers. People I did not know but who showed by example. Sorley Maclean and Norman McCaig both fine Scottish poets and the female war artist Ray Howard Jones whom I had pleasure of meeting…a friend of the artist David Jones. Wonderful inspirational people…

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