Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
‘Untitled’: What’s in a Name?
AAH Student Session
Session Convenors:
Catriona McAra, University of Glasgow, c.mcara.1@research.gla.ac.uk
Rosalind McKever, Kingston University, rosalind.mckever@googlemail.com
Antoinette McKane, University of Liverpool/ Tate Liverpool
As art historians, critics, and researchers we are surrounded by titles, names, and classifications. Names secure and give substance to our critical operations; but names can also constrain investigation if one relies on given solutions without reassessing historical objects and methods.
But what happens when the title is questionable, anachronistic, or purposely absented? From collaborative works that lack designated authors to the untitled work, the enquiring viewer is prematurely left alone to fill in the blanks - a productive insecurity in the face of that which cannot be named, grasped, or conveyed that leaks into, and has an impact upon, the doing and teaching of art and its histories. In this session we will discuss naming as an activity shared by art historians, critics, curators, and artists; thereby also addressing questions of authority, validity, critique, and resistance that become integral to the act of giving - or retracting - titles.
With this session, we hope to open up a space for critical reflection on the work of art history, wherein the validity and function of the name/title/identity must be constantly kept in check, while navigating research through identification and classification that we see ourselves reconfiguring.
Speakers:
Victoria Irvine (University of Glasgow)
'The Heart Desires': The Titling and Appropriation of the Pygmalion Myth in Victorian Art
Hannah Higham (Birmingham University)
Constructing and de-constructing artistic identities: the case of the Master (or Masters) of the Unruly Children
Jaime Tsai (University of Sydney)
The Violence of Interpretation in the Mariticide of Duchamp's Fresh Widow
Vanessa Theodoropoulou (Sorbonne University)
Reading constructed artistic identities as intersections between the aesthetic and the political
Suzanne Spunner (University of Melbourne)
Vindicating Rover Thomas: What Can We Call Him?
Lucy Bradnock (Getty Research Institute)
Who framed Maurice Syndell? Or, why did the farmer cross the road?