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.