Dislocation and Materiality

Dislocation, and Materiality is the culmination my three years of research into artists and theorists, whose work provided me with a clearer direction in my practice as a painter. My research has enabled me to become more aware of the reasons for my current approach to painting that includes: relying on my physical energy, the inherent properties in the material/paint, defining space, memory of place that suggests urban landscape and its inhabitants. The theories of Georges Bataille on the mark, François Jullien on the Chinese concept of lifeforce, and Theodor Adorno on how dissonance is central to artistic and aesthetic process have fed the development of my creative practice. The key artists I researched –Anselm Kiefer, Julie Mehretu, Fabienne Verdier, Mark Bradford, and Phyllida Barlow – provided me with new concepts to introduce in my own work. Mehretu's paintings supplied me with the solution for incorporating political content by means of suggestive titles and expressive marking over imagery. Kiefer's rich assortment of media led me to understand how materials contribute to the meaning of a work. Verdier's gesture and physical energy encouraged me to let go of control and embrace expressionistic paint application. How Mark Bradford uses found brochures and posters from his neighbourhood, transforming them into material for his work gave me the insight that meaning can be in the actual materials. Phyllida Barlow's dynamic works made me consider how the different kinds of marks I create carry vitality and ideas communicated by the material properties of the paint

David Beckham as a historical moment in the representation of masculinity

There can be no doubt that David Beckham is a public figure of intense media interest in contemporary Britain. This paper is the first stage in a project which aims to explore the circuit of representation and reception of Beckham in current culture. I use a grounded theory approach to generate and categorise the ways in which representations are constructed. The empirical focus is on the discourses around Beckham which are apparent in magazines from May to October 2002. This six month period covers some extremely significant events in his private and professional lives; from his injury just before the World Cup; his recovery and subsequent captaincy of England during the tournament; his on-going fashion and celebrity career with consecutive cover spreads for major magazines, to the arrival of Romeo - his second child. As such, this time-span provided ample and diverse examples of how he is represented in this particular form of lifestyle media. The conceptual categories generated through the grounded theory approach are analysed using ideas drawn from queer theory. My aim is to explore whether queer ideas of discursive resistance, disruption, or destabilisation, are useful explanatory frameworks when discussing the modes of representation which are deployed to construct David Beckham as a working class heterosexual subject. I suggest that queer theory does allow an appreciation of new elements being coded into working-class masculinity. However, current changes in the representation of masculinity may be more usefully understood as expansions of the 'sign' of masculinity operating as a commodity form

No TV for Woodpeckers by Gary Barwin, If Pressed by Andrew McEwan, and Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World by Christine L. Marran

Review of Gary Barwin\u27s No TV for Woodpeckers, Andrew McEwan\u27s If Pressed, and Christine L. Marran\u27s Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World

Structuring information work: Ferranti and Martins Bank, 1952-1968

The adoption of large-scale computers by the British retail banks in the 1960s required a first-time dislocation of customer accounting from its confines in the branches, where it had been dealt with by paper-based and mechanized information systems, to a new collective space: the bank computer center. While historians have rightly stressed the continuities between centralized office work, punched-card tabulation and computerization, the shift from decentralized to centralized information work by means of a computer has received little attention. In this article, I examine the case of Ferranti and Martins Bank and employ elements of Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory to highlight the difficulties of transposing old information practices directly onto new computerized information work

Critical Realism and Ecological Economics: Counter-Intuitive Adversaries or Ostensible Soulmates?

The paper questions the compatibility of critical realism with ecological economics. In particular, it is argued that there is radical dissonance between ontological presuppositions of ecological economics and critical realist perspective. The dissonance lies in the need of ecological economics to state strict causal regularities in socio-economic realm, given the environmental intuitions about the nature of economy and the role of materiality and non-human agency in persistence of economic systems. Using conceptual apparatus derived from Andrew Brown’s critique of critical realism and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, the paper refuses ontological nature/society dualism employed by critical realism, and stresses the role of non-humans in practical production and reproduction of socio-economic networks on the one hand, and in broadly defined ecological economic research on the other hand

Material, Trace, Trauma: Notes on some Recent Acquisitions at the Canadian War Museum and the Legacy of the First World War

Recent acquisitions at the Canadian War Museum are considered in relation to the radical innovations of soldier-artists who endured the somatic conditions of the First World War trenches, privileging materiality and psychic reality over visual perception. Barbara Steinman and Norman Takeuchi bring the past into the present through the indexical presence of black and white photographic fragments and the emotive presentation of lost objects as signifiers of the desires of the absent. Scott Waters and Mary Kavanagh evoke dread and the contingency of death through anamorphic distortion and blinding luminosity. Like the suggestive surfaces of the Museum itself, these works unsettle us to make palpable the psychic toll of war