Abstracts

Catherine Grant

This article looks at contemporary artworks that utilise re-enactment as scenes of learning to engage with feminism’s histories. Virginia Woolf’s call for ‘a room of one’s own’ is re-imagined for today, when we might have a room but often not the time to use it. Re-enactment is seen as creating ‘a time of one’s own’, made up out of disparate historical moments which, when brought together, become alive and vital for the present and the future. By using Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the learning-play, the process of rehearsal is foregrounded to conceptualise what is happening when historical material is re-enacted. In the examples explored, this rehearsal is also motivated by an affective charge, a desire to know while accepting and celebrating that this knowledge will always be partial. The learning-play was also devised a method for forming new communities, something that is discussed here as occurring across history as well as in the present moment. The artworks discussed are Salomania by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (2009), Allyson Mitchell’s Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House (2013), Kajsa Dahlberg’s A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries (2006), and Faye Green’s NOT TO DISCOU[RAGE] YOU (2013).

Jacopo Galimberti

Between 1959 and 1961, the Munich-based Spur group (comprising four artists and a writer/political agitator) represented the most important component of the German section of the Situationist International. During these three years, the Spur group was initiated into several critical strategies invented by the SI, including détournement. This article will contextualise Spur within the Adenauer Era, and it will focus on the group’s use of détournement in texts, works, and performances. In particular, it will discuss the way in which détournement was crucial to Spur’s engagement with the Nazi past and issues related to history, temporality, and politics. The close analyses of several works, notably Spur’s magazine issues, will shed some light on a group that played a key role in German art and cultural history but which has been understudied in the English-speaking world.

David Hodge

This article examines Robert Morris's minimal sculptures of the 1960s. It contests the canonical assumption that these works induce a mode of aesthetic experience, which emphasises environmental conditions in the area immediately around them. Instead it claims that the forms of Morris's minimal works were actually primarily keyed to their transportation or circulation between different sites, a key logistical requirement within the developed capitalist gallery system of this period. Combining fresh archival research into the artist's working and exhibiting conditions with close formal attention to various works and shows, the article argues that the Morris's own much-cited interest in contingent experiences (or the variable appearance of his works) can be seen as symptomatic of shifts in the economics and logistics of art practice in 1960s USA. It therefore claims that his minimal practice offers a map of the gallery system, tracking the ′commodification of art′ through all its translations between economic imperatives, practical procedures, and aesthetic experience.

Vivian Li

Rent Collection Courtyard is a 96-m long sculptural installation in west China comprising 114 life-sized clay figures that depict in six continuous tableaux downtrodden peasants submitting their harvest as rent. Collectively created in 1965, by February 1966, the government extolled the sculptural group as a model in art. This article considers through Rent Collection Courtyard how after the Communist Revolution in 1949 the official line in China for art to serve ‘the people’, or renmin, sought to institutionalise a new value system in the arts. Specifically, how did the idea of ‘the people’ shape artistic practice and how did the artist through his or her artwork will the concept of ‘the people’ into being? What was the role of sculpture in mobilising the masses around the idea of ‘the people’? By way of visual analysis, archival research, and personal interviews, this study of Rent Collection Courtyard reveals the actual uneven development of cultural production on the ground in contrast to the state’s vision, as well as the artistic issues artists in early Communist China faced when they were tasked to create a new culture for a new nation.

Daniel Sherman

The French National Museum of the History of Immigration opened in Paris in 2007 as the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (National Centre for Immigration History). Occupying the site of a former colonial museum on the eastern edge of the city, the museum grew out of the desire for recognition of immigrant associations; it was guided in its earliest stages by an advisory committee of historians determined that its displays reflect the latest scholarship. In contrast to earlier accounts of the museum, which have focused on its relation to external political events, this essay seeks to situate the museum within the context of its distinctive institutional politics and the broader politics of display in France. I ask, in particular, how and why a historical museum came to accord so much space and attention to works of (chiefly, but not exclusively) contemporary art and suggest that the answers to these questions lie in the concept of patrimoine, the French version of heritage, and in the cultural logic of state-sanctioned prestige.

Chin-tao Wu

‘We want Maison Hermès to be thoroughly absorbed into Japanese society’, so declared, in all seriousness, the spokesperson of Hermès Japan. How and for what reasons can a Western high-couture house such as Hermès want to be ‘thoroughly absorbed into Japanese society’? Over the last decade, the French couture house Hermès has been very active in positioning itself in the contemporary art scene in Asia and anxious to find a place in the forefront of Asian culture.

This article will first give a historical overview of the nature and practice of art sponsorship by global fashion houses. Second, it will examine the specific ways in which Hermès integrate their art intervention into their marketing strategies. Third, it will situate Hermès’ art practices within their marketing strategies in Asia. Finally, it will conclude by attempting to elaborate on the meaning and implications of Hermès’ art practice within the context of Barthes’ theorising on fashion as well as Adorno’s aesthetic theory.