Conference Report: ‘Making in Two Modes’
University College Cork and Crawford Art Gallery
15-16 September 2010
For two unusually summer-like days in the middle of September, I sat in the darkened lecture theatre of Cork’s
Crawford Municipal Art Gallery with my reporter’s notebook flipped open on my lap and my scribbling-pen hovering
at the ready. Then, for the next seven hours of that day and seven hours all over again the following day, I struggled to
keep pace with a billing of art historians, literary scholars and philosophers.
I dosed my sluggish brain with
complimentary coffee. I phonetically spelled out words I had not formerly known to be words. Script-o-visual, I
spelled, all-o-tropic, it-er-able, self-exe-ge-sis…
The conference in question was entitled ‘Making in Two Modes’ and was organised by Dr. Liam Lenihan
(English and History of Art, UCC) and Dr. Ed Krčma (History of Art, UCC) in association with University College
Cork and the Crawford Art Gallery. The first line of the event’s synopsis defined it as ‘an interdisciplinary conference
exploring the work of practitioners, from the Romantic period to the present day, who both write and make visual art’,
but with the exception of the opening session by Prof. Graham Allen of English in UCC - who talked about the major
Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley - there was little mention of writers who make art. Instead, the spotlight was on
visual artists who write, or who use language in some form as an important facet of their practice.
I feel it is appropriate to mention that my background is as a practitioner, and while I am extensively
interested in both visual art and literature, it is not from a scholar’s point of view. I entertain no illusions with regard
to my own smartness, and I have no intention of pretending to understand things that I actually don’t. Thus, I
apologise in advance if the article that follows is disappointingly low-brow. My appreciation, as a practitioner, of
‘Making In Two Modes’ was derived from the artworks used as case studies and examples during the course of each
session. These were what, during the event, helped to make the speaker’s points most clear, and what stuck in my
head afterwards.
In order to demonstrate Shelley’s tendency to doodle, Graham Allen showed slides of the poet’s surviving notebooks.
Sometimes Shelley would fill a whole page with a detailed scene, but most of the time he was just fashioning an
inkblot into a shape - an eye or a star, a tiny sprawl of foliage or a pattern of concentric circles. I would have
presumed that these were just the idle twitchings of the poet’s quill as his mind lingered over the next line of verse, but
Allen’s talk proposed that Shelley’s pictures were as essential in their own right as his words, vital to the meaning of
the poetry.
Liam Lenihan’s session drew the discussion away from poetry and into art criticism. I’ll admit I got a little
lost in the details of his ‘Miltonic sublimes’ and ‘Godwinian paradoxes.’ What I do remember is his emphasis of
Immanuel Kant’s ideas around taste and genius, about how producing beautiful objects requires genius, but judging
them - or writing about them afterwards - requires only taste. It sounded a lot like something Gauguin would agree
with, according to Dr. Linda Goddard of Art History at the University of St. Andrews, who spoke about the art
writings of the great Post-Impressionist painter. During Gauguin’s time, most of the critics were young literary men writers who did not paint but had plenty of opinions. Gauguin was dubious about the ability of words to do full justice
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to the power of painting, but if anyone could do it he believed it should be the experienced practitioners themselves.
His own approach was deliberately unacademic, differing significantly from that of his peers. His stated intention was
to emphasise an intuitive way of writing to reflect the intuitive way in which he made art, to remain as close as he
could - through all of his practices - to the most basic truth of things.
In the session that followed, Ed Krčma made the jump from Post-Impressionism to 1973, but stayed close to
Gauguin’s belief in the importance of a childlike, spontaneous approach to art-making and the difficulty of quantifying
this in words. 1973 was the year American feminist artist, Mary Kelly, began her durational artwork Post-Partum
Document - a project fundamentally examining the mother/child relationship. For the first six years of her son’s life,
Kelly collected everything from soiled diapers to dead insects to be displayed as art objects and assessed as a whole.
The part of the project that most interested Krčma was the documentation of the child’s journey to acquire language beginning with his hand imprint and ending with the spelling of his name.
The first keynote address, at the close of day one, was delivered by Prof. Graham Parkes of Philosophy in
UCC. Parkes began by talking about how he had never been a fan of audio-visual aids to lecturing, but in recent years,
he had decided to take them on for himself. His aim was to find a way of articulating philosophical ideas through
video, and during the course of the session, Parkes showed a number of short films he had made. In each, the camera
moved across altering scenes or rested on details - spider-webs, climbing ivy, rooftops and broken glass. Sometimes
the films were accompanied by music, voiceovers or subtitles. Parkes mentioned how, as he walks around the
picturesque UCC campus every day, he always notices the way in which the students around him are so enthralled by
their mobiles or Ipods that they fail to see the flowers and trees and river beyond their tiny screens, or to hear the
birdsong and the rustling leaves above their headphones. I was underwhelmed by the actual films, but impressed by
the idea of combining words and pictures through video as a better means of communicating with the coming
generation of attention deficit screen gazers.
On day two of the conference, Lucy Dawe-Lane of Visual Culture in NCAD and the Crawford College of Art and
Design concentrated her session on the pioneering conceptual artist, Mel Bochner. She showed slides of his wordbased artworks and talked about his driving objective to ‘test the boundary between writing-as-criticism and writingas-visual-art.’1 Dr. Gerhard Schoeman of Art History and Visual Culture in the University of the Free State focussed
on the South African artist, Willem Boshoff. He placed particular emphasis on a sculpture from 2009 entitled
Penelope’s distaff - a 3.5ton slab of black, Belfast granite decorated with a pattern of sandblasted text strung around
the stone as though woven into its surface. Olga Smith of History of Art in the University of Cambridge took the
French photographer and writer Édouard Levé, who died by suicide in 2007, as the case study for her session. She
talked specifically about a series of his work entitled Homonymes (1997) in which he sought out and photographed a
number of ordinary men still living today with famous names such as Yves Klien, Fernand Léger and André Breton,
then presented the portraits with each name captioned below the face. For another piece, Angoisse (2001), he took a
sequence of grey and ordinary views of a French village called Angoisse, meaning ‘anguish.’ Levé’s interest lay in the
tiny but significant discrepancies between image and accompanying text, between picture and caption.
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Lucy Dawe-Lane, quoted from the abstract for her conference session.
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At the lead into lunch-break, just when my attention was beginning to waver in the direction of my grumbling
stomach, the session shared by Prof. Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon of the School of Art and Design in
Loughborough University came as a jolt to the senses. Back-dropped by projected visuals and recited in sing-songy
script – it was presented as a proper performance. I was generally baffled by its theory, pretty much right from the
title - Making in Multiple Modes: An Allotropic Dance in Three Parts for Two Players. I understood that the point
was to bring forth that which the topic addressed into its presentation format, but that was about where it lost me. I
was also very diverted by the two different instances at which Meskimmon and Sawdon paused, turned to one another,
and kissed - slowly and emphatically. I risked a glance about me, on the second kiss, and noticed that I was not the
only member of the audience squirming uncomfortably, clearing my throat, uncrossing and re-crossing my legs. Yet
in the Q&A session that followed, no-one brought up the kissing - and so its embarrassing occurrence loomed in the
air above us - perhaps more significant by virtue of its passing unmentioned.
The closing keynote address was by Prof. Michael Newman of Art History, Theory and Criticism in the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Art Writing in Goldsmiths College. He looked at the work of Tacita Dean most specifically Still Life (2009) and The Friar’s Doodle (2010) - examining how Dean creates her own form of
language through drawing and film. The most enjoyable session of the day was that of Dr. Susan Morris, the only
practicing artist to speak at the conference, the only contributor not representing a university. It came as a breath of
fresh air, after all that had gone before, to hear someone talking about their own artwork firsthand. Morris manipulates
things like calendars, diaries, graphs, diagrams and other types of recordings from the world around her. She is
interested in patterns and signs, in the way we make language without words. She talked often of ‘a kind of
meaninglessness’2 that she tries to achieve through her work, or perhaps it could be better described as a new kind of
meaning which falls somewhere between the cracks of pictures and sentences, between conventional forms of
articulation. I was intrigued by how Morris maligns language in such a way as only visual artists, and rarely writers,
can truly get away with.
In many ways, it was the gap between Morris’ session and that of virtually every other speaker which gave me the
most food for thought. As a practitioner, Morris was able to talk about art in accessible English, to express ideas in
three words as opposed to three paragraphs, and to do so with emotional sincerity for her subject.
Revisiting my reporter’s notebook in the aftermath of the event, I admit that I have found it difficult to join
the dots between each session - to present it as a whole with a tidy thread of context running through - but I suspect
that this is my own failing as much as that of the conference itself. The best conclusion I can draw from those two
summer-like days in September is that gatherings like ‘Making in Two Modes’ are not designed to speak to the actual
artists and writers, but about them, that they are not so much aimed at people like me, but at the scholars of this world
– at the academic students and fellow professors of the speakers themselves.
1,837 words.
Sara Baume
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Dr. Susan Morris, quoted from the abstract for her conference session.
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