Mark Garry : a New Quiet

A survey of ten years practice

Patronage and the Idea of an Urban Bourgeoisie

From the reports of travelers and historians, people learn of the crafting of beautiful rock crystal and metalwork objects in the Cairo bazaar and, during the later Mamluk period, of beautiful gilded and enameled glass being produced in commercial areas of Aleppo and Damascus. Given the diverse subject matter of the manuscripts, people may speak of a patronage base allying the intelligentsia to the merchant class within a more broadly conceived bourgeoisie, one whose interests and aesthetic preferences, as compared with those of the court, might be productively investigated through such illustrated manuscripts. One of the frontispieces of a wonderful illustrated manuscript contains clearly Christian iconographical elements, and among the Christian community of Iraq and Syria, people encounter ample evidence for the patronage and production of metalwork, ceramics, and gilded and enameled glass as well as manuscripts

Words from the Arts Council Collection

'Published on the occasion of 'Words from the Arts Council Collection', an Arts Council Collection exhibition toured by National Touring Exhibitions from the Hayward Gallery, London, for the Arts Council of England' - p.4 Catalogue designed by UNA (London)Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:m03/32223 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Outrageous Fortune Tarot Deck

‘Outrageous Fortune’ was a Hayward Touring exhibition showcasing contemporary artists’ interpretations of the classic Tarot de Marseille deck of cards. Tarot playing cards originated in Italy in the 15th century. Used in most of Europe to play games, in the English-speaking world the tarot is generally associated with divination and fortune telling. A rich source of imagery, it includes such archetypes as The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Lovers, The Wheel of Fortune, and The Hanged Man. For this project, seventy-eight artists, whose work encompasses a variety of formal, conceptual, expressionist, literary or design-based approaches, were asked to create a card for a contemporary tarot pack. Each artist has been drawn a card randomly, and invited to reinterpret in their own way

Disasters of war Callot, Goya, Dix

On reverse of t.p.: 'A National Touring Exhibition organised by the Hayward Gallery, London ... in collaboration with the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.'SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:m03/11228 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Images of torture: Culture, politics and power

The digital recording of torture at Abu Ghraib has left pictures which are likely to be the defining images of the war in Iraq. This paper is an attempt to understand the images and why so many critics sought to locate the origins of the cruelty in US popular culture. Internet pornography, reality television and campus humiliation rituals are among the sources said to have inspired the brutality. While such explanations are more than plausible, they ignore the much longer history of violent representation that figures in the European classical art tradition, which all too frequently has justified imperial ambition, colonial conquest, and belief in racial superiority, while eroticizing bodies in pain. In the rush to situate the images well within the terms of a lowly popular culture a fuller understanding of their visual power is lost, as is their place in the cultural politics of torture more generally. The paper begins by outlining influential understandings of photography and atrocity images, before considering the differing explanations of the abuse. In taking a cue from recent scholarship in ‘trauma studies’, the argument is that human suffering should not be reduced to a set of aesthetic concerns, but is fundamentally bound up with the politics of testimony and memory — issues that have been pursued in some of the images produced after Abu Ghraib and which are discussed in the final section of the paper. </jats:p