ROTOЯ Review

The ROTOЯ partnership between Huddersfield Art Gallery and the University of Huddersfield was established in 2011. ROTOЯ I and II was a programme of eight exhibitions and accompanying events that commenced in 2012 and was completed in 2013. ROTOЯ continues into 2014 and the programme for 2015 and 2016 is already firmly underway. In brief, the aim of ROTOЯ is to improve the cultural vitality of Kirklees, expand audiences, and provide new ways for people to engage with and understand academic research in contemporary art and design. Why ROTOЯ , Why Now? As Vice Chancellors position their institutions’ identities and future trajectories in context to national and international league tables, Professor John Goddard1 proposes the notion of the ‘civic’ university as a ‘place embedded’ institution; one that is committed to ‘place making’ and which recognises its responsibility to engaging with the public. The civic university has deep institutional connections to different social, cultural and economic spheres within its locality and beyond. A fundamental question for both the university sector and cultural organisations alike, including local authority, is how the many different articulations of public engagement and cultural leadership which exist can be brought together to form one coherent, common language. It is critical that we reach out and engage the community so we can participate in local issues, impact upon society, help to forge well-being and maintain a robust cultural economy. Within the lexicon of public centered objectives sits the Arts Council England’s strategic goals, and those of the Arts and Humanities Research Council – in particular its current Cultural Value initiative. What these developments reveal is that art and design education and professional practice, its projected oeuvre as well as its relationship to cultural life and public funding, is now challenged with having to comprehensively audit its usefulness in financially austere times. It was in the wake of these concerns coming to light, and of the 2010 Government Spending Review that ROTOЯ was conceived. These issues and the discussions surrounding them are not completely new. Research into the social benefits of the arts, for both the individual and the community, was championed by the Community Arts Movement in the 1960s. During the 1980s and ‘90s, John Myerscough and Janet Wolff, amongst others, provided significant debate on the role and value of the arts in the public domain. What these discussions demonstrated was a growing concern that the cultural sector could not, and should not, be understood in terms of economic benefit alone. Thankfully, the value of the relationships between art, education, culture and society is now recognised as being far more complex than the reductive quantification of their market and GDP benefits. Writing in ‘Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)’, Ernesto Pujol proposes:‘…it is absolutely crucial that art schools consider their institutional role in support of democracy. The history of creative expression is linked to the history of freedom. There is a link between the state of artistic expression and the state of democracy.’ When we were approached by Huddersfield Art Gallery to work collaboratively on an exhibition programme that could showcase academic staff research, one of our first concerns was to ask the question, how can we really contribute to cultural leadership within the town?’ The many soundbite examples of public engagement that we might underline within our annual reports or website news are one thing, but what really makes a difference to a town’s cultural identity, and what affects people in their daily lives? With these questions in mind we sought a distinctive programme within the muncipal gallery space, that would introduce academic research in art, design and architecture beyond the university in innovative ways

Parole In The Penal System: Towards A Relational Theory Of Penality

This thesis aims to develop a theoretical model which explains how the penal realm functions qua system. A second aim is to use this model to challenge a number of contemporary theories of penal transformation (as advanced in the works of Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon, David Garland and Tony Bottoms). Using empirical evidence from the Scottish Parole System, the argument is developed over the course of three case studies, each of which explores a different dimension of systemic functioning: the development of penal policy, the implementation of penal policy; and the decision-making practices of agents working within the system. The findings from the case studies suggest that the penal system functions in a manner akin to an eco-system in which there is a high level of interdependency and struggles for power and control between key sites in the system. The relative balance of power between these sites is determined by both extra and intra-systemic processes. The nature of these processes, in turn, indicates that penal transformation is more contingent and nuanced than contemporary theories would suggest. Transformation is most likely to occur under conditions of extra or intra-systemic strain; where tensions between the cultural practices of the system and the physical and conceptual space within which it is located, become too great to be sustained

Leonora Carrington: “wild card”

The “Artists in Exile” surrealist group portrait of 1942 arguably marks a moment of recognition and inclusion for Leonora Carrington as well as, paradoxically, her moment of “exoticization” and temporary exclusion from Anglo-American criticism at large. The existing literature on Carrington is already unfairly weighted towards her early career in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when indeed she would go on to produce radical and challenging paintings, sculptures, novels, tapestries, plays, set designs and costumes well into her nineties. So why another reading of Carrington’s wartime output? For one, it is useful to present a clearer timeline of her movements and locations, and secondly, it is necessary to review her intermedial contributions to the surrealist magazines of this period. This paper will propose that Carrington was, in fact, at the heart of the avant-garde during this period, a point which has provided fertile ground for future-feminist revisionary commentaries such as Marina Warner, as well as more recent historiographies and creative reinterpretations by Lucy Skaer. A reconsideration of Carrington’s output from this wartime interlude in New York City, including her short story “White Rabbits” (1941) and her Untitled etching for VVV Portfolio (1942), provides insights into her instinctual avant-garde senses of liminality and transgression as well as evidencing the profound respect and acknowledgement her peers held towards her. McAra shared an earlier version of this research at the Biblioteca Nacional de México on the occasion of Carrington’s centenary (6 April 2017) organised through the Leonora Carrington Estate

Witch milk: Samantha Sweeting’s lactation narratives

This illustrated paper explores embodied storytelling in the work of interdisciplinary artist Samantha Sweeting (b.1982). Sweeting’s work is characterised by reference to biblical Madonna and child imagery, nursery rhymes and fairytales e.g. Perrault’s ‘Donkeyskin’ which Sweeting visually rewrites from a feminist standpoint. In 2007-2011, Sweeting produced a controversial body of work in which she allowed various animals to suckle directly from her breasts. With reference to the legacies of French feminist theory (especially Kristeva and Cixous), I argue that Sweeting corporealises the fairytale in a way that opens it up to contemporary debates around the maternal body as a political site

Emma’s navel: Dorothea Tanning’s narrative sculpture

In her critical essay, ‘Some Parallels in Words and Pictures’ (1989), the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) noted a literary dimension to her enigmatic soft sculpture ‘Emma’ (1970). With explicit reference to Gustave Flaubert’s protagonist Madame Bovary (1857), Tanning, a voracious reader, fabricated her own Emma. I use ‘Emma’ to tug at the late surrealist/postminimalist crux in order to reposition Tanning in a more theoretical context. In particular, ‘Emma’ can be read through Mieke Bal’s intertextual notion of the “navel of the text” (2001). Tanning, in turn, can be said to embody Flaubert’s contradictory character as a form of “autotopographical” critique (Bal, 2002). This chapter, therefore, presents a methodological model for art historical and literary analysis, contributing to the growing body of research on underrepresented feminist-surrealist artists. The essay volume, edited by Patricia Allmer, was reviewed favourably by Dr Christine Conley in Racar 42 and mentions this chapter specifically: “Catriona McAra’s criss-cross reading of Dorothea Tanning’s soft sculpture Emma, 1970, with the literary character Emma Bovary positions the sculpture as an intermedial visual object that evokes, in its material specificity, the fetishization of the female character in Gustave Flaubert’s novel and the navel as (maternal) signifier. As an example of Mieke Bal’s “theoretical object” or an art “that thinks,” Tanning’s Emma disrupts modernist and surrealist codes of femininity and art making” (2017, 91)