Livia Rezende chairs a session exploring the notion of space. For more information please click on the link below for a poster giving further details.
Next Session: ‘Space’ Tuesday 8th March
Published February 22, 2011 Spring series 2011 Leave a CommentA year and a half after Dialogues in Design was set up by four PhD students in the History of Design Department of the Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum, a new spring series of events was initiated on Tuesday 8th February 2011 with an event entitled ‘Copy-Repeat’. The event, organised by one of the founding members Stephen Knott, followed a similar pattern to previous events with speakers drawn from other departments of the Royal College of Art to address a common theme broadly relevant to object-based research.
After a successful first year of existence, with subjects as diverse as post-colonialism, design and craft, amateurism, Latin American representations of the self as well as an event aimed to assist the professional development of PhD students called ‘Afterlife’, the series restarted with an audience that filled the College’s new Research Seminar Room. The panel discussing the relationship between original, copy and forgery included Brigit Connolly, a practising ceramicist undertaking an MPhil in the Criticial and Historical Studies department, and Maisie Broadhead, a former student of the Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery Department.
Stephen Knott started the event by drawing attention to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between technical and manual reproducibility in his famous essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. This division defined the talk with the first half interrogating the expectation that technical reproduction produces sameness, with the second focusing on manual reproduction: what happens when a wider audience is given the chance to manually reproduce images through the increasing availability of paints, brushes and artists’ supplies?
The talk by Brigit Connolly that followed shifted attention to the copying of aura that occurs in translation. She asked what qualities of a work were lost or gained through translation and referred to theorists and writers who place this problem at the forefront of their work, such as Walter Benjamin, T S Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges. The latter author’s attempt to re-write Cervantes’ Don Quixote demonstrated the personal colour, uniqueness and aura inherent to attempts to translate ‘authentically’.
Maisie Broadhead used her work as a springboard to talk about forgery, particularly the series of photographs entitled ‘House of Fake’ where she puts prominent forgers of the twentieth century in the same costume of the great artists of the past, imitating mosaics housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her analysis of forgery was sympathetic, explaining how the perceived deception of imitation can actually represent a positive appropriation of the original. The quantity of questions asked to the panel at the end gave some indication of the interest aroused by the theme among a diverse audience.
The Design History Society has supported Dialogues in Design since its inception, contributing to encouraging postgraduate involvement in organising events, fostering discussion and providing an outlet for research, an opportunity often deprived of students in the course of their PhD study.
Written for the Design History Society newsletter
-NEWSFLASH-
In depth reviews of the Dialgues in Design conference ‘Afterlife’ are now available on line from the following link.
-NEWSFLASH-
The postgraduate conference ‘Dialogues in Design: Afterlife’ held on the 1st June at the Royal College of Art is now available to listen to on-line. Please follow link.
-NEWSFLASH-
Parts of the ‘Amateurism’ event held on the 28th January in Department 21 are now available on-line. Please follow link.
Next session: ‘Design as a medium’. Tuesday 2nd March
Published February 16, 2010 Spring series 2010 Leave a CommentTuesday 2nd March: Design as a medium
5.15pm, Humanities Seminar Room,
Royal College of Art, Jay Mews
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‘Design as a Medium’ is curated by Björn Franke of the RCA’s Design Interactions Department, with co-speakers Tobie Kerridge of Goldsmiths and Matthew Malpass of Nottingham Trent University.
Björn Franke, Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, “Design as a Medium for Inquiry”
Tobie Kerridge, Goldsmiths, University of London, ”Speculative design: situating critical practice”
Matthew Malpass, Nottingham Trent University, “Contextualising Critical Design: developing a taxonomy of critical practice”
Refreshments provided. Supported by the Design History Society.
The first event of the 2010 was entitled ‘amateurism’ held in Department 21, which co-founder Fabio Franz admitted was itself an experiment in amateurism.
The event was chaired and introduced by Livia Rezende who in edition to introducing what Dialogues in Design was all about, asked all members of the audience what amateurism meant to them in the context of their work. This brought out definitions and issues that were to be re-visited throughout the talks, and in the discussion afterwards.
Stephen Knott started the talks, with a brief history of a definition of modern amateurism which is defined by its heterogeneity. Before the late eighteenth century amateurism was closely associated with aristocratic pursuit of arts based primarily on loving the activity in question. He explained how the commercial provision of arts supplies, combined with the professionalisation of various crafts resulted in a diverse set of definitions, both pejorative and adulatory, used to denote what ‘amateurism’ meant.
In addition he offered some definitions of amateurism based on theoretical research and performed amateurism itself throughout the Powerpoint presentation, deliberately making mistakes, reading directly from a handwritten and scruffy script, and designing slides poorly with gimmicky transitions.
For example, this pixelated image of Marx, was one slide that was deliberately unprofessional. A poor image of limited quality that often individuals giving presentations apologise for. Also, Marx appeared on the slideshow, apparently randomly, and was not referred to in the course of the talk – another example of bad practice in giving a talk. Amateurism was adopted as method as well as subject.
For the second talk Cat Rossi charted how Italian designer Enzo Mari called on amateur self-assembly as a way to democratise design in the 1970s. His design message carried the socio-political content of filling free time with productive activity, a way of resisting the ‘myth’ of free time and harnessing the potential of the everyday maker. The attempt was to encourage amateurs to create products of high quality – design for everyone – rather than just mere knickknacks.
Textile researcher, Emma Shercliff, used her presentation to explain the problems that have arisen over the course of her research on hand stitching, comparing her own practice with that of a group of presumed ‘amatuers’ in evening classes. She described her experiences of attending these evening classes, and how her time there problematised the easy definition of amateur as ‘not’ professional as presumed characteristics of amateurism do not fit the reality. Amateurs are thought to do things in private, not to get paid, and show low levels of skill, but the amateurs Emma came into contact with sometimes had sold their work, demonstrated particular attention to high skill and publicly talked about their work together. Her presentations exposed some of these problems with defining amateurism.
The fourth presentation by Dionea Rocha Watt discussed the ‘de-skilling’ in the practice of contemporary jeweller Lisa Walker. This trained jeweler deliberately appropriated the lack of skill involved with the use of glue in jewellery production. Seen as a distinctly amateur material and used to deceive viewers of the process by which something is made, glue became the material Lisa Walker used to purposefully puruse the randomness and creativity in ‘sloppy’ craft.
The final talk by History of Design, MPhil student Jessica Jenkins concerned post-war East German folkskunst (folk-art) and the interaction between concepts of folk and amateur in this socialist political context. Official sanction permitted a certain degree of unofficial artistic activity in murals and other activities, which contradicts assumptions of art in a more authoritarian state. Jessica showed a number of intriguing photos of unofficial art and raised question as the the manifestation of amateurism in a different geographical and historical context.
The discussion afterwards focused on the problematic definition of the idea of amateurism, with participants from the floor offering their own ideas as to its various manifestations. Some talked of a structure of amateurism, ranging from ‘high’ amateurs that demonstrate skills beyond the professional, and ‘low’ amateurs who merely imitate. Others recalled personal stories of relatives’ hobbies pursued for pure enjoyment, rather than any monetary gain or fame.
Despite multiple suggestions of what amateurism might mean its definitional integrity remained intact: there is a common strand that unites this diverse set of practices. As suggested by Glenn Adamson, a member of the audience, amateurism does not describe an economic or social space, but a more abstract discursive space. It is defined by the fact that an amateur can not operate powerfully in an arena of discourse, so even if amateurs are ‘other’ to professionals, they also cannot occupy the terrain of counter-discourse as this would demonstrate too much conviction in their practice.
