Liberal Studies & Art History Talk

“The Englishness of Contemporary English Art”

Borrowing its title from Nikolaus Pevsner’s 1956 ground-breaking essay The Englishness of English Art, the lecture is meant as an introduction to some of the key figures of contemporary English art, from the 1970s to the present day. With a specific focus on the rise of the YBAs in the late 1990s and contemporary installation art and performance (Anya Gallacio, Michael Landy, Mike Nelson…), the lecture will explore contemporary English art’s complex and often conflicted relation to Englishness and the identity formations that sustain it. It will try and understand the vexed place granted English contemporary art by art history and will, so doing, show how artists like Mark Quinn or Yinka Shonibare have also experimented with “in-yer-face” aesthetic strategies that enlist aesthetic experience to a re-politicized relation to art, in the present.

Catherine Bernard is Professor of British literature and visual studies at Université de Paris. Her research hinges on the politics of form, from Modernism to contemporary aesthetics. She has published extensively on modernist and contemporary visual culture and art (from the Bloomsbury group, to Andy Warhol, David Hockney, but also Gillian Wearing, Rachel Whiteread or Sam Taylor-Johnson). Among her recent publications, one can mention the edited journal issue: “Ubiquitous Visuality: Towards a Pragmatics of Visual Experience,” InMedia. The French Journal of Media Studies, 8.1, in collaboration with Clémence Folléa, 2020. https://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/. Her latest monograph was published with Sorbonne University press: Matière à réflexion. Du corps politique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains (Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, 2018).

Wednesday March 30, at 2pm, Room 201