Henry Moore Institute
Newsletter Newsletter 100 Issue 100 marks the end of the Henry Moore Institute Newsletter in its current form and announces our Newsletter in a new edition to be emailed regularly to our subscribers from April. The Newsletter will continue to give updates on all of our activities, with each issue taking a particular focus, while pointing to events of importance for the study of sculpture elsewhere. Through exhibitions, research and collections our aim at the Institute is to consistently re-think how we understand sculpture today, with our activities driven by curiosity and celebration of difficulty. Communicating our activities to the sculptural community is essential for us to fulfil our role. In the new format the Newsletter can circulate to more people interested in sculpture and, by becoming more frequent, can be more effective at reflecting research into sculpture. As we approach the end of the first month of 2012 we are working on the new Programme Brochure for the 2012-2013 year, short-listing Research Fellows for this Programme period and setting our exhibition and events programmes to early 2013. This month two of our Research Fellowships came to completion, with two more Fellows - Daniel Zec (University of Zagreb) and Dr Jeremy Howard (University of St Andrews) - joining us in February. The art historian Robert Slifkin (New York University) spent December and January working on his forthcoming book, Incidental Cenotaphs: The renewal of Monumentalism in Postwar Sculpture (and Beyond). In the same period, artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv (Goldsmiths College/University of Reading) used our Library and Archive holdings in a research project exploring the notion of capitalism as a faith system founded on the abstract concept of money, with their Fellowship supported by the Chelsea Arts Club Trust. The exhibitions United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s and Shelagh Cluett: Drawing in Space continue through to 11 March. Since opening at the end of 2011 we have learned a great deal from these exhibitions through artists and researchers generously sharing their knowledge with us. Here at the Institute our exhibitions are not simple presentations, rather they are carefully considered explorations of the ways in which the encounter with sculpture informs meaning. We seek to learn more about sculpture, and test ideas, by providing a close analysis of each of our exhibitions. On 22 February Donald Smith (Director of Exhibitions, Chelsea Space) and Jo Stockham (artist and Professor of Printmaking, Royal College of Art) lead a discussion on Shelagh Cluett’s work. Both were colleagues, and friends of the artist, and this event will help us develop research on the Cluett archive, which has recently joined our collections. On 29 February David Briers leads a discussion, joined by Jo Melvin and Anthony Davies, on the representation of sculpture in magazines, focusing on the period studied by United Enemies. Briers published Pages magazine in the 1970s, and curated the current library display.
February/March 2012 Issue No. 100
Finally, throughout February, our United Enemies film programme runs each Wednesday evening in the Lecture Theatre at Leeds Art Gallery. This series of films explores how artists deployed sculpture in film, and used film to rethink sculpture, with each film-event featuring an artist-led presentation. Opening on 29 February in Gallery 4 is a new series of focused exhibitions showing sculptures from the past that have made sculpture in the present possible. Spanning our current Main Galleries exhibition United Enemies and the forthcoming Michael Dean: Government we are presenting two sculptures by the American artist John McCracken (1934-2011): ‘IV’ from 1985 and ‘Neon’ from 1989. In the mid-1960s McCracken began making cubes, slabs, planks, blocks and geometric shapes utilising the basic languages of sculpture: scale, colour, height, width and breadth asking a very simple question: ‘how do things sit in space?’. His sketchbooks track his shift from painting to sculpture from 1964, with his first ‘plank’ made in 1966. Condensing the possibilities of sculpture into single obstructive objects, McCracken’s forms of colour are handmade to smooth perfection, unlike Minimal sculpture with its machine-made visual clues to manufacture. ‘IV’ leans vertically against the wall, a marbled block of colour, while ‘Neon’ horizontally twists and strikes its way across the wall. In his interviews and sketchbooks McCracken described his sculptures as ‘single things’ operating as ‘presences’. These polished sculptures are excessively sensual and yet simultaneously tough; objects of contemplation which are, in the artist’s words, both ‘materialist and transcendentalist’. These experiments in sculpture began at the same time as the artists in United Enemies and wrestled with the limits and possibilities of sculpture, and continued to the artist’s death last year. These two works from the 1980s were made in a period when McCracken was increasingly alluding to an invisible extraterrestrial realm, his objects as materially unknowable as they might be if left by an alien visitor. Like McCracken, Michael Dean (b. Newcastle 1977) makes sculptures that work on their surrounding architecture, but his give full information to their material form. Made from cast concrete, their surfaces veined and ridged, scaled either to the perfect size to be carried or to quote their surrounding architecture, where they are then found lurking, leaning and propped against gallery walls. An expanded version of our 2011 exhibition of the Italian Arte Povera artist Mario Merz: What Is to Be Done? launches in March at Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, featuring essays generated by research events: Nicholas Cullinan’s lecture given at the Institute and a transcript of Mario Boggia’s presentation at our Exhibiting Merz conference. Research on our summer exhibition Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things has learnt much from this work on Arte Povera. In considering our exhibitions as research documents, we understand our programme of exhibitions developing ideas across each other. In all of our activities, new research is central. Lisa Le Feuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies
Research Our research focus this programme year is on the history of exhibitions of sculpture, launching in a panel at the Association of Art Historians 2012 conference, and continuing throughout the year, including the one-day conference Environments of Polychromy: New Perspectives on Colour and Context for Display in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture in June, organised by Henry Moore Institute post-doctoral fellow Betsy McCormick. The ways that sculpture is examined through its display are crucial to understanding sculpture: importantly, sculpture demands a direct encounter; it needs to be walked around, perceived in space and spent time with. This commitment of starting with the art-object underlines all of our activities. As a centre for the study of sculpture, the Institute strives to encourage people to look harder, think deeper, and consider how sculpture informs and is informed by the ways in which we attempt to understand our place in the world.
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference Open University, Milton Keynes, 29-31 March 2012 Henry Moore Institute Session, Friday 30 March Sculpture and its Exhibition Histories Chairs: Lisa Le Feuvre and Jon Wood, Henry Moore Institute Respondent: Teresa Gleadowe, Series Editor, Exhibition Histories, Afterall It is a commonplace that sculpture is best encountered to be appreciated and that its forms, spaces and meanings are inadequately captured by the photographic image. This session takes up this familiar complaint, arguing that over the last hundred years or so it has been through sculpture's exhibition that it has been most articulately staged, and its complex meanings and histories have been most sensitively presented. Unlike published accounts of sculpture, its exhibitions have been strikingly successful in opening up the material and formal life of sculpture, constructing arguments through presentation and highlighting the subtle, nuanced relations between objects and practices less articulated in more official, text-based readings and histories. Such presentations are to be found in exhibitions, indoor and out, particularly focused on sculpture, and in the interests of curators with specialisation in sculpture, but they are also evident in broader art exhibitions in which sculpture is highlighted in relation to other media and cultural concerns. This session takes up these issues, looking at how exhibition models for sculpture were developed across Europe from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. These were decades which also, of course, witnessed radical sculptural experimentation and a widespread reassessment of sculpture’s limits and possibilities. The eight papers that make up this session each reconsider specific exhibition case studies, some well-known, others less so, asking what lessons these ambitious projects might hold for our understanding of the presentation and reception of sculpture then and today. Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone (Central Saint Martins/Goldsmiths): Neue Museen: Franco Albini and Caterina Marcenaro’s Museum of Floating Objects Marin Sullivan (University of Michigan): Sculture nella cittá: Sculpture as (Group) Installation
David Hulks (University of East Anglia): Before the Museum: Sculpture Exhibitions in Alternative Spaces, 1966-69 Courtney Martin (Vanderbilt University): The People’s Participation Pavilion: Documenta 5’s national pavilion? Nathalie Zonnenberg (VU University, Amsterdam): Sculpture ‘Off-Limits’ at Sonsbeek 1971 Antony Hudek (University College London): Talking Around (the) Sculpture: Artist Placement Group at the Hayward Gallery, 1971 Alex Potts (University of Michigan): Sculpture and not quite Sculpture – the framing of the sculptural in the 1983 ‘Sculpture Show’ Lucy Steeds (Central Saint Martins): ‘Magiciens de la Terre’: Provincialising Modernist Categories Such as Sculpture? www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/2012-conference
Call for Papers: Branching Out: Botany and the Sculptural Object 27 October 2012, Henry Moore Institute Branching Out: Botany and the Sculptural Object moves beyond well-explored examples to shed light on the fact that vegetable matter and plants have been used by artists, collectors and theorists not only as a concrete material, but also on a metaphoric or symbolic level. Botanical imagery, fantastical and decorative or realistic and pedagogic, has formed a powerful undercurrent in European sculpture and engagement with the object since the seventeenth century, inspiring artworks ranging from Gian Lorenzo Bernini's ‘Apollo and Daphne’ (1622-5) to the relief sculpture of Gilbert Bayes' ‘The Lure of the Pan Pipes’ (1932-3). Often expressing a multiplicity of ideas about nature, the perennial appeal of botanical symbolism to sculptors has resided in its ability to negotiate a complex network of meanings, standing at the interstice between the sacred and profane; mysticism and science; conservation and consumption; colonisation and transplantation; growth and decay. From the seventeenth century onwards, science has played a key role in the sculptural representation of flora. Horticultural grotesqueries spoke of a plant world rendered worryingly unstable by the 'new science' which had begun microscopic investigations of living cells and newly examined the effects of light and gravity on plant development. The work of Lamarck and Darwin created a powerful new vision of nature for the nineteenth century, with the visual impact of this work reflected in the ornamental excesses of the Art Nouveau movement that drew upon the overabundance of plant imagery available during the fin-de-siècle to produce objets d'art inspired by the exotic and unfamiliar. In the twentieth century, the dying embers of imperialism witnessed the last great botanical expeditions to the Himalayas, while new technologies and the birth of genetics helped publicise botany's position at the cutting-edge of scientific enquiry and the capricious mechanics of vegetable life. Recognising in these discoveries proof of marvels hitherto unknown, sculpture in the early twentieth century drew on botany as an exhilarating symbol of hybridism and metamorphosis. Post-war artists from Joseph Beuys to Yves Klein and Mario Merz have also incorporated readymade objects with vegetative connotations, such as treetrunks, sponges and fresh vegetable into their oeuvre.
This conference examines the ways in which botany has acted as a continuing source of inspiration in sculpture, concentrating on sculpture produced between the mid-nineteenth and the midtwentieth century. Deadline for submissions: Monday 2 April 2012. To apply, please send a 300 word abstract and one page CV to Dr Elizabeth McCormick, Henry Moore Institute post-doctoral Research Fellow: elizabeth@henry-moore.org Conference Convenors: Dr Edward Juler and Dr Marion EndtJones, both Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows, 2009-11 and 2008-9 respectively.
Forthcoming Events United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s Film Screenings, Leeds Art Gallery Lecture Theatre As part of United Enemies, the Institute has organised a series of film screenings exploring how artists in the 1960s and 1970s deployed sculpture in film, as well as used film to rethink sculpture. Each screening addresses the three central approaches to sculpture taken in United Enemies: ‘Manual Thinking’, ‘Standing’ and ‘Groundwork’. Rarely screened films made by several of the artists in the exhibition are programmed alongside radical and influential work made by British experimental filmmakers. The events feature live expanded cinema works performed in person by David Dye and Malcolm Le Grice, and the guest attendance of Sebastian Boyle of The Boyle Family. Wednesday 1 February, 6-8pm ‘Manual Thinking’ Featuring Western Reversal, a Super-8 film performance by David Dye; and films by John Blake, Shirley Cameron & Roland Miller, David Crosswaite, Peter Gidal, John Hilliard, Derek Jarman, David Lamelas, Liliane Lijn, Barry Martin, Paul Neagu and William Raban. Wednesday 8 February, 6-8pm ‘Standing’ Featuring Horror Film 1, a multi-projector 16mm film performance by Malcolm Le Grice; and films by Jill Bruce & Bruce Lacey, Gilbert & George, Marilyn Halford, David Hall, Tony Sinden, Bruce McLean, Paul Neagu, Anne Rees-Mogg and Guy Sherwin. Wednesday 15 February, 6-8pm ‘Groundwork’ Featuring Sebastian Boyle introducing Dig by the Boyle Family; and other films by Ivor Abrahams, Ian Breakwell & Mike Leggett, Gill Eatherley, Derek Jarman, Bruce Lacey, Malcolm Le Grice, Anthony McCall, William Raban, Chris Welsby, and Bill Woodrow. Film screenings curated by William Rose and Jon Wood. Tickets: £5 per screening. Booking essential, contact Kirstie Gregory: kirstie@henrymoore.org The Henry Moore Institute galleries are open until 9pm every Wednesday.
Shelagh Cluett: Drawing in Space Gallery Discussion, 22 February 3pm, Sculpture Study Galleries, followed by drinks reception Jo Stockham (artist and Professor of Printmaking, Royal College of Art) and Donald Smith (Director of Exhibitions, Chelsea Space) join Sophie Raikes (curator of the exhibition), Claire Mayoh (Henry Moore Institute Archivist) and Cluett’s friends and former colleagues to discuss her work and this display. Booking essential as places are limited.
United Enemies Library Discussion, 29 February, 6-7.30pm, Henry Moore Institute Library With David Briers, Anthony Davies and Jo Melvin. Art magazines in the 1960s and 1970s were a crucial site for the circulation of ideas about sculpture. Our last Library display was curated by David Briers, who selected magazines from our collections that used their pages as sites for wrestling with the problems of sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. In this discussion he is joined by Anthony Davies and Jo Melvin, both scholars who have researched how sculpture and art history have been tested, challenged and defined in art magazines. For bookings contact Kirstie Gregory: kirstie@henry-moore.org / 0113 2467467
2011/2012 Internships Each year we offer supported internships to postgraduate students, and in 2012 for the first time opened the programme to all universities across the UK. Our 2012 internships have been awarded to: 1913 Sophie Barnes, MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies, University of Manchester, will be involved in research for a forthcoming winter 2012 exhibition and associated events programme. 1913 focuses on the role of sculpture in this important year, and considers it in relation to other media. Environments of Polychromy Ellen Feiss, MA Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, will be using the Institute's library, archive and collections to compile a bibliography, source images/artists and develop ideas alongside research staff to support a 2012 conference and exhibition on the theme of Environments of Polychromy. Michael Dean Nicola Celia Wright, MFA Curating, Goldsmiths College, will work closely with curatorial staff and British artist Michael Dean on the technical realisation of a major single-artist exhibition as Dean constructs artwork on site at the Institute. Helen Chadwick Archive: Preservation and Documentation Stefanie Woodford, MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies, University of Leeds, will be working in the Institute’s archive, focusing on preserving and making accessible an extensive collection of colour slides, around 500 in total, in the Helen Chadwick Archive.
Archive
Library
New Acquisitions
On Display
Charles Hewlings We are delighted to announce the recent acquisition of the archive of sculptor Charles Hewlings (b. 1948), whose work has centred increasingly upon the investigation of space as a charged field whose energies are mapped by material. Elements of landscapes, architectural exteriors and objects are incorporated into his sculptures. He has worked in a variety of media, making sculptures through which he interprets specific surroundings. His recent work incorporates steel, wood and found objects to represent his interpretation of places and environments, both known and imagined.
Drawings and Proofs from the New Arcadian Journal: The Blackamoor (2011) 10 March – 13 May 2012
Hewlings studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1967-71) and at Saint Martins School of Art (1971-3), and went on to exhibit his work widely in Europe and North America. His work is represented in public and private collections in the UK and internationally. In addition to his own practice, he lectured and taught sculpture part-time for twenty five years in many art schools in the UK. In 1985, he was Visiting Sculptor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA and has taken part in workshops, symposia and residencies in the UK, Germany, USA and China. He has received an Arts Council Major Award, a Wilhelm Lehmbruck Scholarship and a PollockKrasner Foundation Grant. In 2007-8 he undertook a three month Residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CN, USA.
Several artists involved in the United Enemies exhibitions have donated material to the Library recently. Barry Martin made a gift of copies of the magazine ONE which he edited from 1973-75. Contributors to the magazine include: Kenneth Martin, William Tucker, Anthony Hill and Jeffrey Lowe. Wendy Talyor and Michael Lyons donated catalogues and private view cards of their work for our artists’ files.
The core of the collection consists of six A4 notebooks of detailed working drawings compiled during the making of fourteen sculptures between c.1997 and 2010. They document the construction process, and indicate the intensity and precision necessary to realise the sculptures. The notebooks are accompanied by a series of folders of loose sheets, comprising original drawings, sketches, research materials including photographs, plans and other source materials. A series of sketchbooks, dating from c.1978 to 2005, contain Hewlings’ drawings of the landscapes and places which are the focus of his work. Complementary secondary sources are also included, comprising exhibition catalogues, press cuttings, journal articles and private view cards, a large selection of which date from pre1997. The collection also includes a selection of Hewlings’ talks and accompanying slides. The slides will be digitised and made available to view via the Henry Moore Institute Library’s image database. Charles Wheeler We are also pleased to announce the donation of a fascinating collection of press cuttings, photographs and articles relating to the work of Sir Charles Wheeler (1892-1974). The collection was compiled by Wheeler’s sister, Evelyn Farmer, and we would like to thank her daughter, Jill Dodds, for her generous donation to the Archive. Also thanks to Sarah Crellin for assisting with the donation of the collection. Both collections are currently being catalogued and will be available to consult next month. For further details contact Claire Mayoh, Archivist: claire@henrymoore.org
New Acquisitions Books from the archive of Shelagh Cluett (1947-2007) have been added to the Library collection. Items include group exhibition catalogues that included works by Cluett and catalogues by some of the many students she taught at the Chelsea School of Art postgraduate sculpture programme between 1980 and 2007.
The Library has continued to add to its collection of rare catalogues from the 1960s and 1970s, acquiring Visions Projects Proposals, a catalogue of an exhibition held in 1970 at the Midlands Group Gallery, Nottingham which looked at proposals for environmental art. Ann Sproat, Librarian
Collections Carl Plackman (1943—2004) A new display in the Small Sculpture Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery presents sculptures and drawings by Carl Plackman from the 1970s and early 1980s, including several recent acquisitions to the collection which are shown here in Leeds for the first time. Plackman was amongst the most innovative of a generation of British artists in the 1960s and 70s who challenged conventional notions of sculpture. His finely balanced ensembles of everyday objects and materials, whether described in highly skilled drawings or constructed in the space of the gallery, set up enigmatic environments and propose uneasy, open-ended scenarios. As he explained: ‘In this world no object is neutral. In a sense they are embodiments of value systems which have been decided by others.’ Plackman showed in influential exhibitions, including British Sculptors at the Royal Academy of Arts (1972); British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1981) and The Sculpture Show at the Hayward and Serpentine Galleries (1983). He taught for many years in art schools across the country, including the Royal College of Art (1974—80) and Goldsmiths’ College (1970—99). Many students who went on to become successful artists cite his influence, including Tony Cragg, Liam Gillick and Damien Hirst, whose work is concurrently on display at Leeds Art Gallery. The display runs until 13 May 2012. Plackman’s work is also shown in United Enemies; The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s in the Henry Moore Institute Main Galleries until 11 March. Sophie Raikes, Assistant Curator (Collections)
Noticeboard
Henry Moore Institute
Opening Hours from April 2012
The Headrow Leeds LS1 3AH
Please note that from 1 April 2012, the Henry Moore Institute will be open as follows: Galleries: Tuesday – Sunday 11am - 5.30pm, Wednesday until 8 pm Library: Monday – Saturday 10am - 5.30pm, Wednesday until 8pm, Sunday 1pm – 5.30pm
Open daily 10am-5.30pm Library 1-5pm Sundays Wednesdays until 9pm Closed Bank Holidays Enquiries/recorded information: +44 (0) 113 246 7467 www.henry-moore.org/hmi www.twitter.com/hmileeds
Closed bank holidays
Located in the centre of Leeds adjacent to Leeds Art Gallery, five minutes walk from the rail station.
History of the Institute
Exhibitions
Further information on the architectural design of the Institute and the history of the Headrow site is now available to view online, along with a selection of photographs showing the conversion of the former Wool Merchants houses into the gallery as it stands today. This new research delves further into the early history of the building, and pays special attention to the architecture firm Dixon Jones, who were employed to convert the existing buildings into a modern sculpture gallery. Along with the existing timeline of the Institute's activities, we now also have comprehensive lists of the early exhibitions organised by The Henry Moore Foundation, including exhibitions at the Henry Moore Studio at Dean Clough, Halifax, and Henry Moore Sculpture Trust exhibitions.
Essays on Sculpture: 64 Our journal, Essays on Sculpture, is published three times a year and presents new research into the study of sculpture. In our next issue, 64, Leonie O’Dwyer focuses on Helen Chadwick’s installation ‘Ego Geometria Sum’, an important holding in our Sculpture Archive. Issue 65 is published in April, on the occasion of the exhibition Phyllida Barlow: Bad Copies in the Sculpture Study Galleries, where Sophie Raikes considers Barlow’s drawings. In 66, the graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge examines the ways in which sculpture has been represented in publications; this issue launches in September with a talk at Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 2012 London Art Book Fair. In issue 67, coinciding with a Library display of material from the Archive, Dr Jason Edwards looks at the importance of sculpture to Victorian history. Essays on Sculpture is available for £5 from the Henry Moore Institute Bookshop or from our website. All back numbers (to issue 62) are currently available at the reduced price of £2 per copy.
Guided Tours Free guided tours of the current Henry Moore Institute exhibitions are available on Wednesdays at 7.30pm and on Saturdays at 2.30pm. It is not necessary to book in advance; enquire on the day at gallery reception. To book a tailor-made tour of any part of the Institute’s activities contact us on 0113 246 7467.
Main Galleries To 11 March United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s 12 April – 17 June Michael Dean: Government
Gallery 4 To 12 February Nice Style: The World’s First Pose Band 29 February-13 May John McCracken: ‘IV’ and ‘Neon’
Leeds Art Gallery Sculpture Study Galleries: Mezzanine To 11 March Shelagh Cluett: Drawing in Space 12 April – 17 June Phyllida Barlow: Bad Copies
Sculpture Galleries The Practice and Profession of Sculpture: Objects from the Leeds Collection Talking Heads: Portraits from the Leeds Sculpture Collections Carl Plackman
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Leeds Art Gallery is open daily 10.00am – 5.00pm Wednesday 12.00pm – 5.00pm, Sunday 1.00pm – 5.00pm
The Henry Moore Foundation in partnership with Leeds City Council
www.henry-moore.org ISSN 1363-1152 Newsletter co-ordinated by Gill Armstrong (gill@henry-moore.org)