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Echoes of the Georgian and Victorian societies in contemporary British arts

Echoes of the Georgian and Victorian societies in contemporary British arts

Publié le par Marielle Macé (Source : Gabriel Gee)

Since the 1980s the British art world has witnessed a resurgence of themes, critical thought, and aesthetic materials associated with the 18th and 19th centuries. Yinka Shonibare quotes Fragonard (The swing, After Fragonard, 2004), while Sutapa Biswas mimes George Stubbs in the video Birdsongs (2004). Ingrid Pollard follows William Wordsworth and his sister around Grasmere (Wordsworth Heritage, 1992). Damien Hirst resorts to science and empirical approaches to redefine the relation between nature and culture. Whether associated with the young British artists or the Black Artists, perceived as belonging to the modernist painting tradition like Lucian Freud (Large interiors 11 - After Watteau), or working towards politically and socially engaged practices, such as Conrad Atkinson in Excavated Mutilations (2003) or For Emily (1992), artists copy, invoke, and parody with increased alacrity the arts from the Georgian and Victorian period. And significantly, these two periods encompass the colonisation of India, the sealing of the Union Act between the United Kingdom and Scotland, the rise and peak of the industrialisation process, the development of communication networks, and epochal innovations in the visual arts with the impact of the birth of both photography and cinema.
The links go beyond the sole field of artistic production in their extraction of elements borrowed from the philosophy, literature, economy and politics of the Georgian and Victorian past. Art historians and scholars in British Studies in literature and art departments agree on this judgement, as the exhibition on William Hogarth at the Musée du Louvre in 2006-07 suggested : the show ended with the series Diary of a Victorian Dandy by Yinka Shonibare. In 2008, the ‘société des anglicistes de l'enseignement supérieur' organised its annual conference on the notion of resurgence, seen as polarised in binary oppositions such as burying/emergence, loss/restitution. However, it also divided the sessions in the different periods and disciplines of British Studies.
It is our intention to pursue this research which aims to read over postmodernity in relation to the revival of tradition, the creation of the canon, and the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm 2006). Indeed, the reminiscence can ground itself in the reconstruction of the past, or in the use of attributes, referents, cultural characteristics, and various elements such as a motif, an art work, artistic, philosophical, social, political and economic materials, which become significant through their contemporary interpretation, and the imaginary constructions and myths that result from the creation of a cultural heritage. The resurgence is enabled by the use of quotation (Antoine Compagnon 1979), and literalness (Rifaterre 1979) applied to the visual arts; it is a re-enactment, a plagiarism, a borrowing or a reference to art works, assessed in relation with the specific art worlds from which they are taken.
It would seem particularly prolific to deconstruct and to reword the cultural exchanges between disciplines and historical periods in the context of the current international scientific interest in “cultural transfers”, and their use in critical terminology. The conference the study group One Piece at a Time will organise in June 2010 aims to question the forms but also the causes of the resurgences of aesthetic characteristics within the contemporary British visual arts from the 1980s to the present. It will be an opportunity to compare the shared methodologies and analytical tools in different university disciplines, from practices in use in art history departments, as well as British studies and history.

We welcome papers in particular on the following perspectives:
- aesthetic motifs and quotations from the history of art in contemporary British art works: the use of landscape, portrait, the reference to conventions from the Georgian and Victorian period.
- Cultural and social motifs in contemporary British art works: colonialism, industrialisation, etc…
- Use of historical philosophical, scientific, literary references.

The conference will be held on the 5th of June 2010 in Paris at the Institut Charles V (université Paris VII) or at the institut national d'histoire de l'art.
Propositions of 250/300 words (in French or in English) are to be sent to Sophie Orlando (so.orlando@gmail.com) and Gabriel Gee (gabrielneilg@hotmail.com) before the 15th of March 2009. Answers will be obtained by the 15th of April. Furthermore, in preparation for the publication of the proceedings of the conference on the website of One Piece at a Time (www.geiab.org), participants will be expected to send a preliminary text before the 5th of June 2010.