Peter Muir Art Historian and Lecturer in Contemporary Art History

Dr. Peter Muir Art Historian and Lecturer in Contemporary Art History: Research Profile

http://open.academia.edu/PeterMuir 

Dr. Peter Muir will be speaking at the University of Copenhagen and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj

Dr. Peter Muir will be speaking at the international interdisciplinary conference 'Migration, Memory and Place,' 5-7 December 2012 at the University of Copenhagen and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj.
‘Memory, Myth and Idealization in the work of Lubaina Himid’
http://migrationandculture.ku.dk/conference2012/
http://www.arken.dk/content/us/
http://migrationandculture.ku.dk/documents/MMP_Panels_and_Abstracts_FINAL_WEB.pdf/

Peter Muir will be speaking on Jacob Epstein’s British Medical Association sculptural series

Peter Muir will be speaking on Jacob Epstein’s British Medical Association sculptural series at the conference ‘Re-Writing Objects & Histories of Sculpture,’ The Courtauld Institute of Art, London (11-12 May 12)

CONVERSION, ICONOCLASM AND REVOLUTIONThe discourse surrounding the traumatic events leading to the removal,transport and relocation of sculpture often centres on the acts ofdestruction associated with revolution and iconoclasm. However, thechanges resulting from re-use and conversion, whether spiritual,functional or symbolic, are as important to our understanding of theobjects and locations of sculpture in their surviving states as are therecords and physical traces of loss. This session approach issues raised by changes made to sculpture in situ, objects whose location has remained static whilst their function has been altered, and the disfigurement, dismemberment and disguise of sculpture in the face of radically shifting social and political contexts.

The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R
0RN, May 11 - 12, 2012
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/events/2011/autumn/ThreeDimensions.shtml

Photographs by Peter Muir

Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics: Book Review

Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory,
Aesthetics: Book Review


Peter Muir book review from PHILOSOPHY NOVEMBER 2010 VOLUME
25, NUMBER 4 ISSN 0887-3763 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 0887-3763
end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall: History, Memory,
Aesthetics

Muir, an art historian and Open University lecturer, analyzes Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall" as installation in the Scheunenviertel of Berlin and as a photographic exhibit. These photographs of Jewish life in Berlin from the 1920s and 1930s were shown in 1992 projected upon the buildings by which they were originally taken. The images were then photographed. Muir bases his analysis on recent critical theory and Benjamin's "On the Concept of History." The metaphors of space and memory are employed to show the many layers of this work. Muir does not ignore the sense of tragedy deriving from the knowledge in the viewer that all these people and places were destroyed in the Holocaust. As a comparison to the evocative images from 1992, Muir includes his own pictures of the same sites, taken in 2009. He has created a fine
explication of how art, historical context and emotion combine to project a meaning greater than any one component. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Peter Muir: ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect: Luxury will be King’

Peter Muir: ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect: Luxury will be King’

Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect: “Luxury will be King” JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 15 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2011), pp. 173-192.

N 1479–7585 © 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a938621491~db=all~jumptype=rss

This essay argues that Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1975) exemplifies Lefebvre’s understanding of art’s function in relation to urban space. Yet the aim is not to fix a retrospective meaning onto Conical Intersect. Instead, by mapping conceptual processes and reception history, the essay uses Lefebvre’s theory to interrogate the range of interpretive opportunities provided by this arresting yet temporally specific artwork. Such an approach allows the writing to be alive to the convergence of historical and cultural meanings and tensions that are at the heart of both the essay and Conical Intersect.
 

Footage of the artwork can be found at the following sites:

http://vimeo.com/10617205,

Peter Muir: Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall Book Review

Peter Muir: Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall Book Review

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754669630

Peter Muir book review from PHILOSOPHY NOVEMBER 2010 VOLUME 25, NUMBER 4 ISSN 0887-3763 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 0887-3763 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics

Muir, an art historian and Open University lecturer, analyzes Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall" as installation in the Scheunenviertel of Berlin and as a photographic exhibit. These photographs of Jewish life in Berlin from the 1920s and 1930s were shown in 1992 projected upon the buildings by which they were originally taken. The images were then photographed. Muir bases his analysis on recent critical theory and Benjamin's "On the Concept of History." The metaphors of space and memory are employed to show the many layers of this work. Muir does not ignore the sense of tragedy deriving from the knowledge in the viewer that all these people and places were destroyed in the Holocaust. As a comparison to the evocative images from 1992, Muir includes his own pictures of the same sites, taken in 2009. He has created a fine explication of how art, historical context and emotion combine to project a meaning greater than any one component. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Peter Muir: Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall, History, Memory, Aesthetics

Peter Muir: Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall, History, Memory, Aesthetics

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754669630

Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics

Imprint: Ashgate. Illustrations: Includes c.4 colour plates and 26 b&w illustrations. Published: July 2010. Format: 234 x 156 mm. Extent: 200 pages. Binding: Hardback. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6963-0

Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics theorizes images from Attie's "The Writing on the Wall 1991-1993" installation as a memorial activity, and as an index or habitation for history. The images, which appeared in Berlin's Scheunenviertel district, are suspended by the palimpsestic associations established between the fixated dead of the past and their ghostly appearance in the present. Part of that palimpsest is a collective cultural knowledge of the impending obliteration of community (both the Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Berlin) by mass-produced death. Peter Muir analyzes Attie's work by responding to a series of propositions arising from Walter Benjamin's text Thesis "On the Concept of History."

Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics's presiding metaphor is that of loss-the central problem that the book addresses is that of forgetting. Contents: Introduction; Memory and the Scheunenviertel site; The space of forgetfulness; The archival apace; Spaces of exception; Allegory as a threshold space; Mediating signs; The tragic drama of Shimon Attie; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author: Peter Muir is a Research Associate with MIRIAD (the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design):http://www.miriad.mmu.ac.uk/visualculture/locationmemory/and an Associate Lecturer with the Open University

also see: http://shimonattie.net/test/