This public lecture series is a forum on contemporary issues and current research in typography, art, design, material culture, critical theory, pedagogy, philosophy, society and technology. The series marks the launch of the BA in Visual and Critical Studies.

Fintan Cullen, February 4th at 4:30pm
Aoife Monks, February 23rd at 6:30pm
Colin Graham, April 1st 4:00pm
Brian O’Connor, May 6th 4:00pm
Jean Fisher, September
Jane Pavitt, October
Mieke Bal, November

Lecture Room G6, School of Art Design and Printing, Dublin Institute of Technology, 41 Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1.

All are welcome to these free public events. To secure your place, please book by email: indiscussionadp@gmail.com

Fintan Cullen – Materiality and Display: Ireland in America at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham, Cullen has written extensively on aspects of Irish art and Irish representation. His talk is part of a new book to be published in the next year on aspects of the politics of display as they affected Ireland in the nineteenth century. The book will be entitled 'Ireland on Show' and he is interested in the tensions involved in the display of an art of union in the nineteenth century and an art that represented a growing sense of indigenous nationhood. This paper looks at two examples of Ireland on show in the United States in the late nineteenth century: the still-life work of the Cork-born painter William Harnett and the display of Ireland at the Chicago World Fair in 1893.

Aoife Monks – Playing Dead: Ghosts, Skulls, Corpses, Wigs and Ashes in Performance.

Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, Monks is author of 'The Actor In Costume' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review journal (Routledge). Also, she is currently a visiting research fellow at the Long Room Hub in Trinity College, Dublin. She has written extensively on the material and visual aspects of contemporary theatre practice and is currently working on a project that examines Stage Irishness in the 19th Century, and during the Celtic Tiger period. This paper is part of her wider work on theatre costume and acting. Asking: “what should ghosts wear in performance?” it will examine the role of objects and costumes in representing the dead onstage. Thinking about the history of staging ghosts in the theatre, the paper will turn its attention to the ways in which twentieth century artists have employed objects and costumes in order to access the dead onstage. Looking at objects such as skulls, wigs, armour, ashes, masks, puppets and tracksuits, this paper will investigate the peculiar work of acting in bringing the dead back to life in performance.

Colin Graham – ‘Motionless Monotony’: New Nowheres in Irish Photography.

Graham lectures in English at NUI Maynooth. He is the author of "Ideologies of Epic" and "Deconstructing Ireland," and co-editor of The Irish Review. He has written on art and photography in many journals, including Third Text, Cultural Studies, Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, Source and Circa. This lecture will trace a journey in and around Dublin, and then in to the midlands of Ireland, following photographers and artists who have recently travelled in and catalogued new Irish nowheres. Their work can be seen as akin in the methodology to the ‘psychogeographic’ walking and writings of Iain Sinclair, with the intention ‘to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking’. This fascination with dead space inhabited by living people will be discussed in recent projects by Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly ('Moving Dublin'), Mark Curran ('Southern Cross'), Dara McGrath ('By the Way'), Simon Burch ('Under a Grey Sky'), Martin Cregg ('Midlands') and Jackie Nickerson ('Ten Miles Round'). The lecture will discuss the ways in which these photographic projects seek out the traces and marks of human activity, even when it is part of the eradication of the landscape, and find these traces to be the faint marks of presence.

Brian O’Connor – Mimesis and Modernism.

Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin O'Connor is the author of "Adorno’s Negative Dialectic" (2004), "Adorno: The Routledge Philosophers" (2011) and of papers on the German Idealist and Critical Theory traditions. He is the editor of "The Adorno Reader" (2000) and (with Georg Mohr) of "German Idealism: An Anthology and Guide" (2007). The idea of 'mimesis' appears, like the word itself, to be a category of an earlier and long past period of European culture. Identified with realist imitation it could have no apparent place within the defiantly non-representational art of modernism. Yet we find in the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno an effort to explain modernist art’s capacity to stand in critical relation to society as grounded in its 'mimetic' properties. This paper will reconstruct and critically evaluate Adorno’s innovative thesis, exploring, in particular, his notion of the ‘authentically’ aesthetic expression of social reality that is not an imitation of that reality.

Jean Fisher

Jean Fisher is Professor of Fine Art Middlesex University. She studied Zoology and Fine Art, later becoming a freelance writer on contemporary art and postcoloniality. During the 1980s in New York she contributed to Artforum and co-curated exhibitions of contemporary Native American art with Jimmie Durham. She is the former editor of Third Text, and the editor of the anthologies, Global Visions (1994), Reverberations: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency (2000), and, with the Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera, Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (2004). A selection of essays, Vampire in the Text, was published in 2003. She contributed to the catalogues of documenta11 (2002) and Sharjah Biennial (2005), the publications Shades of Black (2005), The American West (2005) and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s Vision, Space, Desire (2006). Most recent essays on individual artists include Francis Alÿs, Black Audio Film Collective, Sonia Boyce, James Coleman, Willie Doherty, Jimmie Durham and Edgar Heap of Birds.

Jane Pavitt

Jane Pavitt is the Head of the History of Design Department at the Royal College of Art London. She is a specialist in 20th century and contemporary design, with a particular area of expertise and interest in design curation. She worked as a research fellow and exhibition curator at the V&A museum for over ten years, curating a series of exhibitions which broadened the framework of understanding for design practice and history in the museum context. These included Brand.New (2000), an exploration of branding from a historical and contemporary perspective; and Cold War Modern: Design 1945–70 (2008). She is currently preparing a V&A exhibition for 2011 entitled Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990. More on Jane Pavitt.