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/

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

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

I’m very pleased to announce that an article ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect: Luxury will be King’ will be published by The Journal For Cultural Research in July 2011.

JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 15 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2011)

ISSN 1479–7585 © 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/14797585.asp

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.

http://vimeo.com/10617205

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLg2ID2KCTI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKo_g5EZonI&feature=related

Peter Muir: The Exotic Museum of an Extinct Race and the identity of a new Europe Centre for European Studies University College London

Peter Muir: The Exotic Museum of an Extinct Race and the identity of a new Europe: Centre for European Studies University College London

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gamneWlklMMJ:www.ucl.ac.uk/ces/events/before-ec/muir+peter+muir&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google.co.uk



By engaging with a series of photographic palimpsests in relation to a set of propositions outlined initially by Walter Benjamin in his ‘On the Concept of History,’ this paper considers the development of European identity in the aftermath of The First World War. Of particular relevance here is Benjamin’s understanding of reparation for loss through personal and collective redemption (Erlösung: or secular redemption). The paper argues that there is an ambiguous relation in history that is retained by such images; a relation that has to do not only with an opening out towards the future, but with historicity and the obligations of memory. As Benjamin writes, ‘the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search these image for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous trace where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back may discover it.’ By juxtaposing the material archive of images represented by August Sander’s photography of Weimer Germany (in the 1920s and 1930s), and the imagined archive of The Exotic Museum of Extinct Races proposed by German Fascism (1930s and 1940s, to be built in Linz, Austria), this paper develops a tension that attempts to reveal this trace, this landscape of subjectivity, a terrain marked by objectification and destruction as well as materialism and Utopian idealism. The paper invites the viewer of these palimpsests to play the part of curator, sifting and selecting evidence of tyranny and extreme action as well as tolerance and diversity in order to project the possibilities of a new and redemptive European identity that coincided with the creation of EEC.

Art History: Dr. Peter Muir

Dear all, I’ve set up this blog in response to a number of requests concerning art historical research and methodologies, also in relation to a series of inquiries concerning my new book on Shimon Attie’s work in Berlin: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754669630Of course, I welcome your feedback, questions and commentary on any of the material that appears here.