Public v Private Art Collections: Who Owns Our Cultural Heritage by Kathryn Brown

 

 

Collage as Form and Idea: Tristan Tzara, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau

Kathryn Brown

Loughborough University, United Kingdom

This paper examines the artistic practice of collage as an exchange of ideas between modernist poetry, painting, and theatre. Focusing on Tristan Tzara’s critical writings about the works of Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau published from the 1930s to the 1950s, I analyze collage as both a form and an idea that develops from early Dada poetry and that unifies Tzara’s conception of the relationship between the visual, the verbal and – ultimately – the social. I consider different ways in which collage disrupts the rules of grammar, narrative, and the spatio-temporal order of figural painting and functions as a ‘vehicle of thought’ that exceeds its representational content. Tzara’s focus on the wider social potential of works by Picasso and Rousseau defends what is essentially a metaphysics of collage and shows the importance of this style of art production to a transformation of the way in which individuals envisage the narrative of their own lives. Collage may be a visual art form, but for Tzara it is also a means of demonstrating a new way of engaging with the world and of comprehending humankind’s place within it.

Download the full programme here: VISUAL DADA Week

 

Conference: Images and Texts Reproduced

Panel: Digital Artists’ Books: From Object to Event

Session Chair: Kathryn Brown

This panel examines the impact of computer technology on the production, reception, and reproduction of artists’ books. While text is a reproducible form, an artist’s book is typically valued for its unique material qualities: the ways in which language, imagery, paper, and typography are combined within a single object or limited set of multiple objects. With the possibilities that computer technology offers for user interactivity, however, digital artists’ books challenge the unique “object” qualities of their paper counterparts. This session seeks to explore the aesthetic and performative possibilities offered by screen-based books that generate distinctive events depending on choices made by the reader/user. Taking up Nelson Goodman’s terminology in Languages of Art an artist’s book might be understood as an “autographic” art that, like painting, resists reproduction. Yet the introduction of computer-based interactivity into a digital artist’s book might redefine that work as an “allographic” art, one that, like a musical score, can be played repeatedly in different ways. This session queries whether the distinction between “autographic” and “allographic” is viable in the context of digital artists’ books. How does reconceiving of the artist’s book as a “score” impact on our conception of the role of the artist and the values that attach to the digital object? What is the role of the reader who generates unique performances of image and text? On the boundary between singularity and multiple user-generated performances, digital artists’ books seem to trouble our very conception of what it means to be a “unique” or “reproducible” work of art. Papers are welcome that approach these themes from a range of aesthetic, literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives.

Please send proposals of max 250 words to: http://wp.unil.ch/reproduction2017/program/panels/

The deadlines for submissions is: 31st August 2016.

Papers may be in English or French.

Tristan Tzara: Un Siècle de dada 1916–2016

Journée d’étude : Vendredi, 27 mai 2016, 9.30–17:00

Salon d’or, Ambassade de Roumanie

5, rue de l’Exposition, Paris

Invité d’honneur: Prof. Henri Béhar (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3)

À l’occasion du centenaire des premières performances Dada au Cabaret Voltaire à Zurich, cette journée d’étude cherche à élaborer le rôle de Tristan Tzara non seulement dans l’épanouissement du mouvement dada, mais aussi dans l’évolution de l’avant-garde européenne dans un contexte plus large. Tout au long de sa carrière, Tzara maintenait des liens étroits d’amitié et de partenariat artistique avec des peintres de sa génération. Cette journée d’étude examine ces influences réciproques et analyse le développement du langage ‘visuo-poétique’ de Tzara depuis ses débuts littéraires jusqu’à sa mort en 1963. Les interventions se concentrent sur les dialogues entre texte et image dans les recueils de poésie de Tzara, les transformations du mot en objet visuel, et les préoccupations de Tzara dans son rôle de critique d’art. En mettant l’accent sur les rapports entre artistes et sur l’entrecroisement des médias et des pratiques, les intervenants examineront l’œuvre de Tzara comme un site privilégié d’expérimentation littéraire et visuelle.

Les langues de cette journée d’étude sont le français et l’anglais.

Entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles

Inscription auprès de k.j.brown[@]tilburguniversity.edu

Programme

9.30–10.00 Café

10.00–10.10 Accueil

Session 1: 10.10–11.40

Peter Dayan (Université d’Édimbourg): De la musique dans De nos oiseaux.

Agathe Roblot (Université d’Édimbourg): La collaboration entre Tzara et Marcel Janco sur La première aventure céleste de Mr Antipyrine.

Cécile Godefroy (Historienne de l’art, PhD): Tristan Tzara et Sonia Delaunay: Projets de Robes-poèmes.

11.40–12.00 Pause

Session II: 12.00–13.00

Eric Robertson (Université de Londres): ‘Il y a des zigzags sur mon âme’: Tzara and Arp’s Dada collaborations.

Cécile Bargues (Historienne de l’art, PhD; Commissaire d’exposition): Tzara, Dada, les masques.

13.00–14.00 Déjeuner

Session III: 14.00–15.30

Kathryn Brown (Université de Tilburg): Tzara et la ‘mythologie moderne’ d’Henri Rousseau.

Stephen Forcer (Université de Birmingham): L’Importance de l’imposture intellectuelle: Tzara, Film, Knowledge.

Estelle Pietrzyk (Conservatrice en chef du Patrimoine, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg): Tristan Tzara au musée: Introduction à l’exposition L’Homme Approximatif au Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg.

15.30–15:50 Pause

15.50–16.45 Entretien avec Henri Béhar (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3): ‘Je n’écrirai jamais le tombeau de Tzara’.

Cette journée d’étude bénéficie du soutien financier de l’Université d’Édimbourg et de l’Institut culturel roumain de Paris.

 

 

London: ‘Collecting, Consuming, and Creating: Debunking Myths of Taste Making in the Contemporary Artworld’, Christie’s (July, 2016).

Glasgow: ‘Ethics and Interpretative Violence: Matisse’s Unpublished Illustrations for Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune’, Society for French Studies Annual Conference (June, 2016).

Paris: ‘Tristan Tzara et la mythologie moderne d’Henri Rousseau’, Centre Culturel Roumain (27 May, 2016).