Critical Dialogue

As a curator and artist, Richard Grayson explores the operations of narrative: how we generate them to help us understand the world around us and how in turn these narratives generate worlds of their own. Orthodox and heterodox belief systems for scientific, religious and political constructions of the world are investigated and their contemporary resonances explored both through his own work as an artist and exhibitions of works by other contemporary artists.

British performance video artist Marty St James' artworks engage with the portrait in time and space. In a process the artist describes as 'sculpture in time' his video portrait installations capture his subjects in a 'sliver of time' - moving yet frozen, self-consciously entrapped by technological paraphernalia. St James' innovative combination of the figure and time based media is a contemporary redefinition of the portrait employing live performance, photography, moving image and drawing.

'An unforgettable mixture of bubblegum teen melodrama and grisly phantasmagoria', Hausu is a true masterpiece of surrealist Japanese cinema. Darren Elliott-Smith will introduce this rarely screened film illustrating how elements of Japanese supernatural folklore traditions are appropriated in this generic hybrid of horror, musical, animation and melodrama and is re-presented as kitsch fantasy that is ripe for counter-cultural identification.

In Robert Day’s 1961 film The Rebel, Tony (played by Tony Hancock) leaves philistine Britain after his sculpture Aphrodite at the Waterhole crashes through his studio floor into his landlady’s living room. Tony throws up his tedious desk job and heads for Paris, stopping on the way to cast his bowler hat and umbrella into the English Channel. Tony’s entrée into the world of Bohemia takes place in a bar. Here he encounters a cadre of angry young men arguing about art and threatening Revolution while a benighted waiter looks on with bemusement. Thereafter, Day presents Tony as a charlatan, bordering on madness whose puerile efforts at art are understood only by an eccentric circle of black be-sweatered Beatniks. The film is funny because so many of the conventions it rehearses are still familiar today, almost fifty years after its release. In this lecture, Adams explores how art got into this position, the origins of the idea of the artist as alien outsider and art’s fractious relationship with its public. The exploration takes us back over 200 years to early nineteenth century France, to another pub, the one featured in Louis Picard's knockabout comedy Le Peintre Au Cabaret (loosely translated as the painter at the bar), and to a strikingly similar set of anxieties about what artists are up to, why we need them and their often baffling relationship with society. Steven Adams is Associate Head of School: Research in the School of Creative Arts. He teaches on post graduate programmes across the school and supervises post-graduate research at Masters and PhD levels including projects on landscape representation and cultural geography, Courbet, Positivism and Science in 19th century France, and Landscape, Representation and the picturesque in eighteenth century England.

Valerie Kobov is an art critic, writer, curator and educator. She combines her doctoral research at Paris 1, Sorbonne in art history (cultural policy, art market and broad-based support for contemporary art) with international projects which have to date included art critical events in Australia, professional development courses for art audience development professionals in France and launching and mentoring emerging art gallery projects and events in Zimbabwe.

Wendy Tuxill discusses the experience of being a PhD researcher at the University of Hertfordshire. Her research in the field of contemporary sculptural ceramics shows a way that artists may be empowered to develop critical literacy in a field that has traditionally lacked a critical and research-based approach to practice.

Les explains the management and co-ordination of suppliers and customers in a global industry.

How customised goods and services are gaining mass appeal and how technology helps companies in the production of customisable products.

A conversation between Lou Dalton and Shaun Borstrock, Head of Design in the School of Creative Arts.