picture / tableau /screen

picture / tableau /screen

a visual symposium at UCA Canterbury
organised by Moyra Derby and Matthew de Pulford

Herbert Read Gallery
UCA Canterbury
New Dover Road
Canterbury
CT1 3AN

6 November - 4 December 2012

Gallery-based discussion with the artists and supporting speakers each Tuesday at 3pm

Picture / Tableau /Screen are terms shared by film, photography, painting and other fine art practices that engage with the pictorial. The visual symposium at UCA’s Herbert Read Gallery will consider the distinct but overlapping contexts they might open up.

Four separate installations of work will take place on consecutive Tuesdays in November 2012. Each installation will be followed by a talk and gallery-based discussion with the artists.

The ongoing installation of work during the symposium aims to foreground the process of work becoming aligned to a viewer and a viewing space. Viewing is considered active, offering a form of participation within the restraints of the pictorial. This alignment is considered a dialogic moment between art object, environment and viewer at which point all three become active participants (1).

Picture / Tableau / Screen all imply the sense of something composed, ‘cut out’ (2) distanced, staged and contained in order to be looked at. George Berkley writing in 1732 asks us to imagine a ‘diaphanous plane erected near the eye and perpendicular to the horizon’ (3), a theoretical proposition that delineates a pictorial version of vision. Proposed here as an articulation of ‘picture’ ‘tableau’ and ‘screen’, Berkley’s plane can be said to both enable and stand in the way of visibility. An external projection that infers an internal counterpart, it shares with these three terms the presumption of a front; it is a plane that faces a viewer. Within the pictorial, the quality of facing activates an attitude of looking, a particular form of attention and reception, even if it is articulated through turning away or moving past.

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(1) Jacques Rancière The Emancipated Spectator ‘Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our normal situation’ (Verso 2009 p 17)
(2) Roland Barthes Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein 1977 tableau as ‘cut out’ in Image, Music, Text (Fontana Press 1977 p 69-78)
(3) George Berkley The Theory of Vision Vindicated 1732 (The Works of George Berkley). Jonathan Crary discusses Berkley’s ‘diaphanous plane’ in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Mitt Press 1990 p55)

Installation 1
Tues Nov 6th open discussion at 3pm
Angus Saunders –Dunnachie ; Mick Finch ; Derek Hampson ; Jost Münster

Installation 2
Tues Nov 13th open discussion at 3pm
Beth Harland and John Gillet ; Joan Key and Anton Lukoszevieze ; Laura Lisbon ; Andrea Medjesi-Jones

Installation 3
Tues Nov 20th open discussion at 3pm
Nicky Hamlyn ; Bob Matthews ; Philomene Perecki

Installation 4
Tues Nov 27th open discussion at 3pm
Ian Bottle ; Kate Hawkins ; Anthony Matt ; Pat O'Connor

Discussions supported by:
Moyra Derby ; Mathew de Puford ; Mick Finch ; Adrain Lovis ; Dominc Rahtz