the dark knight returns - neomedieval art after britain
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Presentation for CAA 2010 Conference in Chicago http://conference.collegeart.org/2010/ Historians of British Art British Art: Survey and Field in the Context of Glocalization Chair: Colette Crossman, independent scholar, Arlington, Virginia The recent three-volume History of British Art published by the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain invites reflection on how art historical surveys situate British art in political, economic, social, and cultural processes that affirm, vex, and otherwise relate “glocally,” integrating global, regional, and local contexts. What is “glocal” in the historiography, narratives, and methodologies of British art surveys and the ways they lend coherence to a field, blur its boundaries, or position its subject in the mainstream or margins of art history? How do they treat subjects and subjectivities—citizen, immigrant, emigrant, diasporian, tourist—that bridge local and global through lineage, heritage, memory, and travel? To what effects do they distinguish what is non-British or serve readers outside Britain? In what ways do British art surveys or British art in world art surveys advance nonart glocal political, economic, or social relationships? ------------------------ Neomedieval Art after Britain Neil Mulholland, Edinburgh College of Art Discourses of “British art” are suspended in a geopolitical vacuum that is blind to constitutional changes that have taken place in the United Kingdom since the fin de siècle devolution settlements. These discourses share the common fallacy of assuming that “Britain”—as a euphemism for a state and as a cultural imaginary—continues to exist as locus of meaningful cultural debate. In fact, since the mid-1960s, the Keynesian bureaucracy designed to promote the imaginaries of British art has been gradually dismantled, replaced by new European, national, regional, and transurban cultural technocracies. This is a symptom of neomedievalism—overlapping microgeographies supplanting unilateral colonial narratives such as “Britishness.” To understand and envisage the cultural implications of the “Balkanization of Britain,” this paper critically compares the 2009 Venice Pavilions of Britain, Scotland, Wales, Ulster, and the English Regions, foregrounding a neomedieval self-reflectiveness as the basis of a post-British alterity.TRANSCRIPT
The Dark Knight ReturnsNeomedieval Art after Britain
www.neilmulholland.co.uk
Geopolitical Neomedievalism
The New Medievalism
“A system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty.” (Bull: 245) 1977
Commission by ‘English’ artist Hans Holbein
Commission by ‘German’ artist Liam Gillick
Neomedieval Cultural Ecologies
Neomedieval Aesthetics
Neomedievalism
Umberto Eco, "Dreaming the Middle Ages," in Travels in Hyperreality (1973).
"..we are at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination..."
Luke Collins
Cee Face (2005)
Marcus Coates Spartacus Chetwynd
Olivia Plender
The Folly of Man Exposed or the World Upside Down, 2006, Details
35 Warrender Park Road
Disclosures II: The Middle Ages, Laxton September 2008 - part of Histories of the Present produced by Nottingham Contemporary.
Featured Oliva Plender’sBring Back Robin Hood
Michelle Cotton (Curator)
The Long Dark (2009)
Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
Torsten LauschmanThe Darker AgesMary Mary, Glasgow, until Sat 21 Nov 2009
Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives; Michael Bracewell, writer and critic and Alun Rowlands, artist, writer and Head of Fine Art, University of Reading (Curators)
The Dark MonarchMagic and Modernity in British Art
Tate St Ives 10 October 2009 – 10 January 2010
Alex Pollard
Robin Hood Vortex (2008)
Oil on Canvas
Alex Pollard and Claire Stephenson – Four Fatrasies, Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London 20 January - 14 March 2010
Plastique Fantastique
Ribbon Dance Ritual to call forth the Pre-Industrial Modern part of The Event in Birmingham in April 2007
Spartacus Chetwynd Mime Troupe (left)
Spartacus Chetwynd Mime Troupe Feminism, Little Tales of Misogyny.
Sequences, Reykjavik, November 2009
Eric Raymond (1999)
‘Cathedral’ model neomedievalism
‘Bazaar’ model neomedievalism
Vince Koloski A Maze Book (2000) Neon, Carved acrylic sheet, Wood, Circuit board, and toy mazes
Slides available at www.neilmulholland.co.uk
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License.