Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann and Max Jorge Hinderer discuss their controversial exhibition ‘The Potosi Principle’ on the circulation of art and wealth during Spanish colonial rule. Moderated by Melissa Gronlund.

Potosí, the famous silver-mining city in Bolivia, synonymous with immense wealth and unbridled exploitation, was the capital of the mining industry in Latin America from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and played a crucial role in the development of European capitalism and the migrations associated with it. Even today, the expression ‘vale un Potosí’ / ‘worth a fortune’ is commonly used in Spanish.

‘The Potosi Principle’ offered a critical approach to the Bicentenario – the two hundredth anniversary of the independence movement in Latin America. It addressed the relationship between trade structures and ways of thinking in Latin America and Europe and their social effects on both continents, both before and after the citizens’ revolutions of the nineteenth century.

Details of this event can be found here.

On Making is a a Two-Day Seminar Workshop in Art Theory and Philosophy.

These seminars shed light on some historical conditions and lineages that are often overlooked. Initially, the seminars will look at how Greek philosophy (Heraclitus, Socrates/Plato and Aristotle) contributed the fundamental concepts of knowledge regarding how something comes about and how it changes while maintaining identity or the kind of knowledge which enables us to produce things. Thereafter, with Romanticism, a different concept of history and making emerges in which notions regarding education (in Greek ‘paideia’) are mixed together with Christian theological overtones. Romanticism engenders the modern utopian thinking of the ‘making’ of history as salvation where the ‘material’ of the artist is the whole of human society (most evident in the Bauhaus and Soviet Art). Following the failure of ’68 the notion of the tinkerer/bricoleur was taken up as a post-modern alternative to the capitalist mode of production, In this regard we shall look at the ideas of Levi-Strauss, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, and de Certeau. Of relevance here is the work of the curator Harold Szeemann who formed the Prinzhorn collection in the 1920’s and curated the exhibition “Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk” in 1933.

For more details of the event click here.

Professor of Ceramic Art and Design Rob Kesseler received support from NESTA as part of their fellowship programme (1999-2005) which supported the development of talented individuals working across science, technology and the arts.

During his fellowship, he worked with botanical scientists at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and used his artistic and technical skills to capture stunning images of microscopic plant material. Rob was recently invited by NESTA to discuss his work at their Innovation in the UK event. Details of his fellowship and the event can be found here.

David Ferrando Giraut, Road Movie (Perpetuum Mobile), 2008

The fear of place and the manifestation of this in contemporary art is the territory for TOPOPHOBIA. Following an introduction by curators Eggebert-and-Gould, Dr Caterina Albano will open the afternoon with a discussion on the history and development of this anxiety disorder and its relationship to the modern urban context. Artists Matthias Einhoff, David Ferrando Giraut, Polly Gould, Uta Kogelsberger, Emily Speed and Louise K Wilson, and writer Leslie Forbes, will each give a talk and come together to discuss their work in relation to the themes of TOPOPHOBIA. This symposium contributes to current debates on freedom and the culture of fear, and connects us to the existential human question of how each of us finds our place in the world.

The symposium coincides with the TOPOPHOBIA exhibition at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery, 123 Kennington Road, London, SE11 6SF until 19 February 2012. The exhibition and publication that includes the work of Anne Eggebert, Matthias Einhoff, Marja Helander, David Ferrando Giraut, Polly Gould, Uta Kogelsberger, Abigail Reynolds, Almut Rink, Emily Speed and Louise K Wilson. During the spring and summer 2012 the exhibition will tour from the Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London, to the Bluecoat, Liverpool, and on to Spacex, Exeter.

This TOPOPHOBIA Symposium symposium is a Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design Art: Public Realm research group event.

Fulll Firearms. Emily Wardill. 2011. Production Still. Feature length film

The Prizes, with a value of £70,000 each, are awarded to outstanding scholars who have made a substantial contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and where the expectation is that their greatest achievement is yet to come.

The Prizes commemorate the contribution to the work of the Trust made by Philip Leverhulme, the Third Viscount Leverhulme and grandson of the Founder. The broad fields of research covered by this year’s awards were Astronomy and Astrophysics, Economics, Engineering, Geography, Modern European Languages and Literature and Performing and Visual Arts.

Join us for Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design Research Degree open evening Tuesday Dec 13, 5.30pm-7.30pm.

Granary Building
1 Granary Square
London N1C 4AA
1st Floor Granary Building

SEMINAR ROOMS D115 & D117
17.30 Introduction – Professor Janet McDonnell, Associate Dean of Research at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design
17.35 Centre for Design Against Crime – Adam Thorpe
17.40 Double Agents – Anne Tallentire
17.45 Graphic Design – Phil Baines
17.50 Fashion – Caroline Evans
17.55 Textile Futures – Carole Collet
18.00 Introduction to James Swinson – Research Students Tutor
The Student View:
18.05 George Unsworth
18.10 Jona Piehl
Research Area A115/A114
18.15-19.30 Q & A session plus refreshments

Visit:
- Central Saint Martins research degrees

Following on from the pioneering ‘cash-point art’ project carried out by CSM’s award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC) we’re thrilled to be able to offer a fully funded PhD studentship starting in October 2012. Research activity will be based around ‘Innovation Against ATM Crime’ with academic support from DACRC, funded by the UK cash machine network LINK.

The purpose of the PhD is to develop a practice-based and design led approach to enhancing customer experience and improving safety in the fight against cash-point crime.

The PhD Studentship totals £20,200 per year for three years, with the potential to extend it to 4 years. This covers full tuition fee support (currently at £4,200 per year for Home/EU students) and an annual tax-free stipend of £16,000, with some additional budget available to encourage and maximize the dissemination of key outputs.

We’re looking for a student with strong skills in design practice/strategy, a postgraduate qualification and first degree of 2:1 or above in a design related discipline. Prospective students should definitely take a look at the Designs Against ATM Crime publication, downloadable free of charge from the DACRC website.

To apply for this exciting opportunity download the RF1 application form and briefing document from the University of the Arts London applications page. You can email Research Management and Administration for more information: researchdegrees@arts.ac.uk, or call 0207 514 2120.

Completed forms must be emailed to researchdegrees@arts.ac.uk by the closing date March 1st 2012.

On 23 November 2011, following the recent addition to Afterall’s One Work book series, Jeff Wall: Picture for Women, Afterall and Central Saint Martins organised a conversation between Wall and the book’s author, David Campany.

Jeff Wall’s work marks the migration of photography as an art form from the printed page to the gallery wall. His work over the last three decades, mainly through the use of backlit transparencies but also through large and medium-scale prints, has made a key contribution to the development of pictorialism as a technique and an idea. In the conversation, Jeff Wall discussed in depth a small selection of images from his oeuvre with David Campany.

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives and works. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2008), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007), Tate Modern, London (2005–06), Schaulager, Basel (2005), the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (1994) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1984).

David Campany is a writer, curator and Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster. His books include Art and Photography (Phaidon 2003, reprinted in 2012) and Photography and Cinema (Reaktion, 2008). Last year he co-curated ‘Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film’ at Le Bal, Paris.

This event was the Sandra Blow Memorial Lecture 2011 and an Exhibitions: histories, practices and Image, Performance, Object research event.

Jeff Wall: Picture for Women is part of the One Work series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly shaped the way we understand art and its history.

www.afterall.org

Jean-François Chevrier (left) and Michael Fried in the feedback session after their papers

On 28 to 29 October 2011 the symposia Tableau: Painting Photo Object took place in the Starr auditorium at Tate Modern. Tickets for the event were sold out and the audience heard keynote presentations from Philip Armstrong, Fulvia Carnevale, Jean-François Chevrier, Michael Fried, Michael Newman and research papers from Moyra Derby, Adi Efal, Françis Gaube, Atsuhide Ito, Cédric Loire and Andrea Medjesi Jones.

The symposia asked the question:

Why do so many contemporary artists, working across all media (paintings, photographs, objects, installations, live art), build on pictorial traditions of image construction to set the scene for new narratives?

The representational structures of tableau, dispositif and apparatus, were addressed by the speakers in their papers across the two days of the symposia. The event was filmed and the videos will shortly be available online.

This event, organised by Mick Finch and Jane Lee, was a collaboration between Central Saint Martins and Tate Modern and is a part of the wider Tableau Project, the next phase of which will be a series of events around questions related to image planned for Autumn 2012.

If you would like to receive information about this project’s future events please email m.finch@csm.arts.ac.uk

A genius for money

Central Saint Martins’ Caroline Dakers, has published a book about the remarkable James Morrison (1789-1857) – a hugely successful Victorian entrepreneur, who became the richest man in England.

This is a spectacular rags to riches story: Son of a village innkeeper, James Morrison proved to be a genius at making money, responsible for the greatest private capital accumulation in modern Britain. From a simple haberdasher he became the kingpin of textiles and Napoleon of shopkeepers, creating a business with a turnover, in 1830, of the equivalent of £200 million today. He invested around £100m in North American railways, was involved in global trade from Canton to Valparaiso, and acquired land, houses and work of art to rival the grandest of aristocrats.

Caroline Dakers is professor of cultural history at Central Saint Martins. She is the author of The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society and Clouds: Biography of a Country House, both published by Yale University Press.