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2011
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2017, Geraldine A. Johnson, "'The Life of Objects': Sculpture as Subject and Object of the Camera's Lens," in: Instant Presence: Representing Art in Photography, ed. H. Buddeus, K. Masterova and V. Lahoda (Artefactum, 2017), pp. 17-57
2011, Exposed: photography & the Classical nude (pp. 6-13)
2018, Geraldine A. Johnson, "''In consequence of their whiteness': Photographing Marble Sculpture from Talbot to Today," in: Radical Marble, ed. W. Tronzo and N. Napoli (Ashgate Press, 2018), pp. 107-132
This chapter explores Man Ray’s inventive approach to representing African objects within the realms of fashion and popular culture that resonated far beyond the avant-garde community where such objects had long become commonplace. How such photographs mirrored the shifting meanings and signification of the objects they featured and the manner in which they functioned are examined within the context of the ubiquitous assimilation of African forms into all facets of popular Western culture.
2016
Alpha & Omega: Tales of Transformation. The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet introduce twenty-four stories of transformation and metamorphosis from Greek and Roman history and mythology. Each story is illustrated with one or more object from across the collections of the University of Sydney held in the Nicholson Museum, the Macleay Museum and the University Art Gallery. In 2018, these same three collections will themselves be transformed into the new Chau Chak Wing Museum. This final Nicholson Museum exhibition represents the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega of what has been and what will be.
'This book is platypus-like, unclassifiable.' - Marina Warner, London Review of Books + Since the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term 'heterosexual' and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnés. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs, edited by Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen
2020, The Tears of Eros. Moesman, Surrealism and the Sexes
This catalogue is published as part of the exhibion 'The Tears of Eros. Moesman, Surrealism and the Sexes', Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 15 February - August 16, 2020. The main character in 'The Tears of Eros' is the Utrecht- born artist Joop Moesman (1909-1988), the only officially recognised Dutch Surrealist. He was a controversial artist, whose sexually charged paintings often caused a scandal. In this exhibition, we present his oeuvre in the context of his international Surrealist contemporaries. Surrealism is known as a movement of male artists, in which women were primarily assigned the role of muse. Their bodies became objects for the Surrealists’ sexual and often violent fantasies. Moesman’s art is exemplary in this respect. Few of the women in his paintings have an identity: their faces are omitted, masked and, in one case, even stripped of flesh. Moesman’s work is still unsettling today. That is why in The Tears of Eros we deliberately dive into the Surrealist world of sex, gender, fetishism and taboos. For this reason, we are also showing – for the first time in the Netherlands – many works by female Surrealists. How did they view these themes? And how did they depict their own identity and sexuality?
The oeuvre of American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) is permeated with cultural, psychological, and art historical refractions of the Venus/Aphrodite myth: female nudity exposed and contained by the artificiality of poses; the narcissism of the female artist as a radicalized alter ego of Venus; and ambivalent stagings that counteract and ridicule the notion of Venus as a Muse. In her late series Intra-Venus, the strikingly beautiful Wilke, dying of cancer, documents her physical decay with chilling detachment. In boldly exhibiting the obscenity of fatal illness, Wilke addresses the horror inscribed in the myth of the birth of Venus, a horror no longer sublimated by female pudor. Reading Wilke’s work alongside Didi-Huberman’s Ouvrir Venus (1999), this essay shows how the artist re-interprets Venus in an unprecedented, existential way, exploiting the full power of the mythological story and opening it up to post-feminist concepts of the body.
This thesis is the first detailed comparative study framing how and why fine art and its theories were deployed in the discursive and creative texts of two major Irish writers, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Previous studies have tended to focus on these writers' texts' literary qualities and junctures with history and philosophy: fewer have focused on fine art, and those which do have treated each writer separately. The study's comparative framework rectifies this critical deficit to contribute new knowledge by synthesizing past individual studies and comparing more recently available sources; it also provides a new slant on old knowledge in a new place. The primary focus is on the writers' relations with painting/its theories; this occupies more space, quantitatively and qualitatively, in this study (as in does in the writers' texts), although sculpture, a key consideration for Yeats, and embroidery are also considered. Exploring how and why fine art and its theories shape these two writers' respective ideas, themes, and concepts and use of language, the study's method is comparative: it compares the writers' documented encounters with fine art and citation of its histories/theories in discursive texts in tandem with evaluating how and why fine art theories and images inspire their creative texts; it's method reveals how theory and praxis pressure, complicate and modify each other. The study's conceptual framework suggests how and why enlisting fine art/its theories assisted the writers' oppositional thematics and aesthetics. Yeats's emphasis on transcendence/the eternal and beauty, and Beckett's sponsorship of finitude/doubt and irony, are revealed as reinforced by, and partly built out of, the two writers' divergent responses to fine art theoretical texts, and use of fine art images. The study demonstrates how these diverging positions are responses conditioned by, and filtered via wider, twentieth century intellectual and contextual shifts and embedded in the art history and theory the writers read and use in their texts. The study demonstrates how and why the writers' fascination with seeing fine art, compounded by reading its theories/histories, produced their own essays engaging with it; it evaluates how and why fine art/its theories assist with their themes/aesthetics, provide images for their creative praxis, and supply a focus for self-reflection on the capacities/incapacities of language and literary forms which they engage in, and which conscript (or fail to conscript) fine art images. The thesis is structured in four chapters. The first chapter reveals how and why the writer's readings, and subsequent re-writings, of fine art theory/history, permit them to selectively focus on, and inflect, the themes (identified above), detectable and available in the fine art theories of the "sister arts" and the "separate" arts which they read and cite. Excavating the basis of the writers' theories of fine art/the arts, in their ideas of perception/seeing, seeing and hearing, and their concepts or use images and mediums, the second chapter argues that these assist the two writers to develop oppositional ideas of the power of language/ekphrasis (Yeats) and of the limitations in language which conscript fine art objects and its visual images (Beckett). How and why this impacts on their texts is demonstrated. Comparing how and why the two writers use fine arts/its theories in Irish and European contexts the third chapter links fine art texts and their images with how/why Yeats constructs, represents and criticizes history/nation and how/why Beckett divorces the arts from debilitating nationalism(s) and representations of nation or self. The final chapter evaluates how and why fine art/its theories impact on praxis by examining the writers' framing of portraits, landscapes and interiors/still lifes; it evaluates how/why Yeats enlists the authority/precedents of fine art traditions, to frame and represent ideal subjects and themes in his texts and why/how Beckett orientates texts towards more modern, non-representational paintings and images to put pressure on these subjects and themes and to question the capacities of texts to do so. In evaluating the writers' responses to fine art/its theories, the study argues that fine art/its theories, by proxy, afford opportunities for the writers to reflect on two crucial issues or themes, central in/to their essays and creative praxis. Firstly, fine art/its theories permit Yeats's texts to point to their own capacity to summon an image as object of/for meaningful thought, which an essay may analyse, and a poem grasp, and surpass by using it as a symbol in a unifying text; the power of fine art in Beckett's texts permit them to register reactions to its sensuous, material, silent objects that dismantle thinking and symbols, and disable what language cannot grasp, so it exposes the limitations of what language can do when it distorts the silence and visuality in autonomous images which elude it. Secondly, the thesis demonstrates how and why fine art/its theories provide an opportunity to construct opposing dialectics or thematics in which the fine arts may stand as symbols of tradition, enduring human achievements that transcend time and space or exist as experiential images or objects which disappear in time as they evoke human finitude and failure.
Botticelli Past and Present Botticelli’s influence and innovations continue to inspire interest and passionate debate among art historians and lovers of art. In four chapters, spanning centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception, Botticelli Past and Present engages with the significant debates about Botticelli. Each chapter collects several essays and includes a short introduction that positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The chapters are organized chronologically, beginning with discussion of the artist and his work in his own time, moving on to the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
2018, Botticelli: Past and Present, eds. Ana Debenedetti and Caroline Elam, London , 203-217
2013
"Compilation of 2113 artworks (sculptures, reliefs, paintings, frescoes, drawings, prints and illustrations) of 912 identified artists of Great Britain and Ireland, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. 197 pp. With an Index of Artists, a Directory of Owners and an extensive Bibliography. The catalogue is also available as paperback book ($14.00) or as hardcover book (€26.09): see the link." https://sites.google.com/site/venusiconography/home/topical-catalogues/volume-5-1-the-british-and-irish-venus Readers interested in the quantitative approach in art history are kindly invited to contact the author directly.
2013, Modern Movements: Arthur Bowen Davies Works on Paper from the Randolph College and Mac Cosgrove-Davies Collections
In this case study drawn from Veder's book, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (2015), this catalogue essay profiles Arthur B. Davies's engagement with kinaesthetic modernism: the connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early-twentieth-century American culture. Veder argues that American modernism’s formalist approach to art was galvanized by theories of kinaesthetic bodily response derived from experimental physiological psychology and facilitated by contemporary body cultures such as modern dance, rhythmic gymnastics, physical education, and physical therapy. Situating these complementary ideas and exercises in relation to enduring fears of neurasthenia, she contends that aesthetic modernism shared industrial modernity’s objective of efficiently managing neuromuscular energy. In a series of interconnected case studies, this book demonstrates that diverse modernists associated with the Armory Show, the Société Anonyme, the Stieglitz circle (especially O’Keeffe), and the Barnes Foundation participated in these discourses and practices and that “kin-aesthetic modernism” greatly influenced the formation of modern art in America and beyond.
This research paper investigates the formation of the international photographic collection at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. This is a story that has never been told. It is the story of how the NGV set up one of the very first photography departments in a museum in the world in 1967, and employed one of the first dedicated curators of photography, only then to fail to purchase classical black and white masterpieces by international artists that were being exhibited in Melbourne and sold at incredibly low prices during the 1970s and early 1980s, before prices started going through the roof.
This exhibition and the accompanying catalogue examine one of the most important educational tools and sources of inspiration for Western artists for over five hundred years: drawing after the Antique. From the Renaissance to the 19th century, classical statues offered young artists idealised models from which they could learn to represent the volumes, poses and expressions of the human figure and which, simultaneously, provided perfected examples of anatomy and proportion. For established artists, antique statues and reliefs presented an immense repertory of forms that they could use as inspiration for their own creations. Through a selection of thirty-nine drawings, prints and paintings, covering more than four hundred years and by artists as different as Baccio Bandinelli, Federico Zuccaro, Hendrick Goltzius, Peter Paul Rubens, Michael Sweerts, Charles-Joseph Natoire, Henry Fuseli and Joseph Mallord William Turner, this catalogue provides the first overview of a phenomenon crucial for the understanding and appreciation of European art.
POV is a photographic body of work revealing the powerful relationship between images and language by exploring the effects pornography has on semantic meaning and interpretation. The use of pink neon text establishes a sexual undertone to otherwise banal imagery. Through close spatial proximity, connotations are generated between image and text and within image pairs, drawing viewers to formulate subjective visual-textual associations. These associations nudge viewers to question the source of their erotic connection with commonplace imagery. The purpose of this document is to provide a detailed framework supporting the body of work by illustrating pornography’s role in contemporary sexuality and explaining the intimacy between images and words. By revealing the interactions between language and imagery, it places scrutiny on the effects pornography has on semantic and semiotic interpretations and meaning.
Brought to Asia in the early 1840s by Europeans, photography was both a witness to the dramatic changes that took place in China from the second half of the 19th century through the early 20th century and a catalyst to further modernization. The medium of photography was readily adopted by Chinese export painters, who learned the mystery of the new technology and practiced it alongside their traditional training. Chinese photographers created a new hybrid aesthetic in which literati conventions were blended with the reproductive medium of photography.
2010, Brill's Companion to Aphrodite
In the Augustan era, Greek-style images of Aphrodite permeated Roman visual culture. From the elaborate state-sponsored monuments of the new regime, to more modest private homes, the goddess of love featured prominently in works of art whose idealized naturalism was inspired by the achievements of Classical and Hellenistic Greece. These images, widely popular in Augustan times, marked a distinct break with earlier practice. They replaced the sober and imposing Venus of the Republic — divine ancestress of Rome, and victory-bringing goddess of Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar — with a more elegant, Hellenized deity. In so doing, they offered a particularly vivid example of a broader cultural phenomenon: Augustan classicism. In recent years, scholars have highlighted the moral and ethical connotations of classicism in the early empire. Drawing especially on elite literary texts, they have characterized classicism as an elevated style appropriate for the gods, and for the new princeps. This article brings together Greek-style images of Aphrodite from the public and private realms to offer a different perspective; my focus is on the allure, rather than the moral authority, of Classical forms. At the same time, I demonstrate how this allure took on programmatic functions in the early principate. In major public monuments such as the Forum Augustum, it signaled the attractive qualities of the new imperial system through the metaphor of a beautiful woman’s body. In paintings and statuettes from the private sphere, by contrast, it helped to create the pleasurable ambiance that was central to the Roman conception of otium. This article thus complements earlier studies to provide a more nuanced understanding of Greek art, and especially Greek Aphrodite types, in Roman visual culture.
2018, Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019). ISBN: 9781138191921
Fine Arts and Literature Chapter for Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture
2008, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Normative conceptions of embodiment can operate only by fixing or essentialising the body’s necessarily processural (or existential) ontology. Given that traditional film-based photography and cinema are reliant on the arrestation of a process, a process of fixing analogous to that seen in the constitution of normative bodies, this paper suggests that it is not surprising that photography has long been considered a privileged realm for the presentation of idealised bodies. Some critics have of course problematised this primarily indexical role of the photographic image by showing how this is disrupted in avant-grade practices in both photography and the cinema. In this paper, what is suggested instead is that the rupture of indexicality in traditional cinema and photography was always already inscribed in the technological apparatus or medium itself, and that what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its indexicality) was therefore only the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium. To this end, this paper presents case studies of the work of (amongst others) Edward Weston and Bill Henson, paying particular attention to their conceptualisation of the material ontology of the medium in which they work to show how they, respectively, reinforce or disrupt normative modes of embodiment.
Using the well-known work of the artist Hannah Höch (b.1889 d.1978, German) as a springboard for discussions about the experiences of the German ‘Neue Frau’ (New Woman), this thesis will explore and unveil the work of other artists who explored similar themes or had similar experiences to further contribute to revisionist feminist and LGBT art history. Utilising a collection of primary sources in addition to secondary sources and existing research to explore the contents of artworks, placing them within a social-historical context. The artworks will also be discussed and placed within the wider framework of visual culture via comparisons with the covers and content of lesbian weekly magazine Die Freundin. Weimar Germany, Berlin in particular, was known for being a hotbed of liberalism. They offered women unprecedented freedoms within Europe; this was expressed through access to work and women’s participation in politics as well as through a brand of modernity and style unique in the city, women’s dress influenced and was influenced by urbanity through a fashionable osmosis. Part of the style was an appropriation of typically male styling: women took up traditionally male pass times and sported shorn hair; shirts and smoking were just some of the monikers of the Neu Frau. In the lesbian and transsexual communities too, with thanks to the social liberalism of the city and the influence of research from sexologists presented in public papers, were also afforded greater freedom of expression. Even within these ‘subversive’ groups however the entrenched power paradigms of archetypical gender dynamics infiltrated and were translated into hierarchies of dress code and typecasting and rating women based on how apparent their ‘male attributes’ were. Why was the ‘Mannweib’ (translation: virago- ‘a woman of masculine strength or spirit’) so adorned? Was this an expression of ‘learned misogyny’ within the queer community? How did the lesbian press support and squash preconceived ideas about sexuality and gender identity? This thesis will therefore examine Höch, with her celebration of femininity in the context of her artistic peers to investigate whether they confirmed or cracked down on sexism and preconceptions about womanhood in their artworks.
This is the "manual" that in its print version comes with each entrance ticket for "Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930". It is designed to enable the navigation of the exhibition (curated by Anselm Franke and Tom Holert, until July 9). See https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2018/neolithische_kindheit/neolithische_kindheit_start.php.
An exploration of the indeterminacy of the visual works of Claude Cahun and her refusal to be categorised. Cahun's ambivalent critiques of colonialism, fascism, capitalism, traditional art and literary practices, surrealism, gender and identity are examined through a number of photographic self portraits, collages and objects.
2010, Smith A. C. & Pickup S. (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Aphrodite
Emerged from a conference at the University of Reading
2015, Exposure: Journal of The Society for Photographic Education
2013, The Challenge of the Object – Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Congress Proceedings, (Eds) G. Ulrich Großmann/Petra Krutisch
Since their arrival en masse in Europe during the nineteenth century, the reception of statuary and cultic utensils from African and other, then colonised cultures has continued to provoke debate on what is, and what is not art. The paper examines the context and methods of visual representation of African and Oceanic art objects in a number of publications that between 1915 and 1935 participated in transforming the perception of such objects from ‘savage idols’, or remnants of the so-called ‘primitive races’ to attaining the status as works of art coveted for their formal rigour and inventiveness. The paper contends that the role of Carl Einstein (1885-1940) and his book Negerplastik (1915) was central to this transformation. Following the ‘discovery’ of such objects by the artistic avant-garde, Einstein pioneered a format of visual representation that raised their status from ethnographic record to art object on a par with the western artistic canon. Like art history, which since its inception as an academic discipline has relied on deriving meaning from the analysis of photographically reproduced works of art, Negerplastik made productive use of the photographic image as simulacrum for the authentic work. Combining methodologies hitherto applied to theorize European sculpture with visual strategies akin to those representing classical sculpture as advocated by Heinrich Wölfflin, Einstein, as it were, ‘invented’ the category of African art. The paper assesses how Einstein’s book functioned as the model for subsequent representations of African sculpture, and how Negerplastik can be seen to resonate in the photographic albums of Charles Sheeler (1918) and Walker Evans (1935) as they in turn generated their own rhetoric of intervention into the discourse on modernist representation.
2013, Geraldine A. Johnson, "'(Un)richtige Aufnahme': Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History," Art History, vol. 36, no. 1 (2013): 12-51
2017
Royal College of Art Textile Master Dissertation In art, photography and film, makers use textiles and surfaces to enable viewers the experience the catharsis, therefore developing a better understanding of the self but also of the other. Even erotic writing uses fabrics such as leather and silk to describe sexual arousal, and intercourse. From a neurobiological point of view, humans have a natural predisposition to fall in love and be loved, an emotional correspondence that can only be truly felt through experience and feeling. An awareness extended towards the decision of what to wear leading to an openness towards effective communication with our surroundings and in relationships. Touch is an essential step for an effective contact with the other person. The presence of touch creates a more complete scene, and makes the narrative more realistic and sensuous. Touch is then, arguably, one of the best mediums to express and exercise empathy, feelings and experiences in order to survive.
Social theorist Zygmunt Bauman puts forward the proposition that ‘life is a work of art’. The statement appears glib without Bauman’s further qualification: ‘Being an individual’, he suggests, ‘(that is, being responsible for your choice of life, your choice among choices, and the consequences of the choices you chose) is not a matter of choice, but a ‘decree of fate’.
Magazine article on using a museum's collection to teach undergraduate students about ancient concepts of geography and space. See pages 14-15 of the magazine.