(Re)Making Public Campus Art: Connecting the University, Publics and the City

Public campus art in the U.K. is predominantly a postwar phenomenon and can be interpreted as artworks situated in university spaces with free access to its audience: any public users — where the multiplicity of such audience defines them as “publics”: communities of interest. Public art’s ontology of “publicness” is complex: what is “public” and who are the “publics”? The local, theme and form of art in “public” space is contested along dualist conceptions of public/private, indoor/outdoor, closed/open, permanent/temporary, decorative/interactive, past/future, space/place, online/offline, and so on and so forth. It may moreover span any material, digital, performative and socially engaged, practice-based work and multimedia beyond more traditional sculptural artworks. This article analyses how public campus art has traditionally related to historic university agendas and campus communities, but has recently provided a platform for far-reaching public engagement beyond the campus, thus reaching new audiences

On the moving line and the future subjunctive of drawing in a post-Duchampian age

This article proceeds from the position of an in-depth analysis of present visual art practice, in so far as it reflects past histories and contains the germ of a not very enticing future. Beginning with the refusal of contemporary art to define its field (contrary to the evolving skill- and specialist-based practices of other art forms), it is argued that post-modern artists exploit the universalist doctrines of conceptual art to plunder other disciplines in a romantic, laisser-faire, if ironic manner. This colonisation is the result of post-modern theory and the influence of Duchamp and a consequence of the abandonment of drawing in its structural relation to art practice. In arguing for the importance of abstract and conceptual ways of exploring new ideas through drawing (as a complex and rhyzomic set of graphic connections, evolving in time) distinction is made between the rigidly systematic and the broadly systemic infrastructure of drawing in relation to creative acts. Following a notion borrowed from the short-lived Polish writer Bruno Schulz, that ‘time is too narrow for all events’, the second part of the article proposes an alternative post-Duchampian future dependent on the slogan ‘there cannot be a future for art without drawing, and drawing is the future of art’. Within this practice-based scenario, artists will also have to re-invent a culture of philosophical and moral responsibility for representation, specifically in relation to the field of animation, the meeting of drawing and high technology. This field cynically promotes brutality and pornography of all kinds, within negative graphic images of sexist and racist stereotypes, yet falls outside of artistic discourse. The recovery of drawing is linked to questions of artistic agency as well as notions of critique and probity

On models and Mickey Mouse

The re-issue of a nineteenth-century French Drawing Course is the occasion for an examination of issues of ‘models of good practice’ in current art teaching. These are listed as an expanded set of student-centred pedagogical paradigms, which embrace the forceful popular imagery of electronic games and comic strips. The formalist adaptations of comic-strip imagery by artists in the 1970s which challenged traditional divisions between high and popular art, are contrasted with the scathing Marxist analysis by Dorfman and Matterlart, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, which still has political resonance. The darkly ambivalent, if much theorised, appropriations of popular imagery by contemporary artists Pettibon and Murakami are adduced as part of an on-going problematic, where ideological readings are glossed over for fear of jeopardising the liberal consensus in art and education

In touch and out of mind: the psychodynamics of obsessive drawing

This publication contains selections from a four-day inter-disciplinary seminar on Madness and Creativity organised by the Durrell School of Corfu in May 2005. The high level of the papers indicated the growth of theoretical re-engagement with issues of creativity. Petherbridge’s contribution contextualised aspects of ‘obsessional practice’ in relation to a brief historical overview of art and alterity, and proposed that such practices have become depathologised and naturalised within contemporary studio practice and its reception. This developed and theorised a well-received conference paper given at the University of New South Wales, Sydney 25-26 July, 2003. The lecture “Obsessive Drawing” was fourth of a 6-part lecture Series Drawing towards Enquiry delivered at the National Gallery London from February 8th – March 15 2006 in association with Camberwell College of Art, The University of the Arts, London and the National Gallery (taped and filmed.) The series ended with a symposium chaired by Professor Stephen Farthing, Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Drawing, University of the Arts, London, Drawing: The Future and the proceedings were published in 2006 (ISBN 1-870540-79-4). As the result of the wide range of this extremely well-attended lecture series, Petherbridge was invited to give the prestigious McNabb Memorial Lecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, June 4 2006 (celebrating the acquisition and exhibition of the wide-ranging Dorothy Braude Edinburg collection) and the lecture “Contemporary Drawing: Reinvigorating the Graphic Imperative” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on March 12 2007. She returned to issues of graphic creativity and obsession in relation to issues of creative block and self-critical practices in the chapter “Creativity and the Critical Gaze of Practice” for the book New Perspectives on Creativity: Visual Culture and Creative Practices, edited by Andrew Spicer and Angela Partington, intended for publication (Manchester University Press) in 2008/9

Graphic Intersections: Erga, Parerga and Pro-Erga

The place where design and art intersect is drawing with its elastic capability of functioning as the whole, the preparatory and the supplementary work. Drawing doesn't only occur at the level of individual practice but can be part of wider "graphic events" where concerted acts of recording, performing, inventing and disseminating link diverse visual practices across time. Two such discursive events are discussed as paradigms: the accidental finding of the Villa Aurea in the 1480s in Rome and Alois Senefelder's lithographic publication of the illustrated Book of Hours of Emperor Maximilian I in 1808. Both were stylistically influential through the popularising of 'grotesque' configurations that unify heterogeneity through linearity

The primacy of drawing: histories and theories of practice

The primacy of drawin

So much for received notions about 'Sculptors' Drawings'

This published article in a Special Issue of the Sculpture Journal is the development of a paper “Signing and Signalling: Some Polemics around Sculptor's Drawings”, delivered at the symposium Sculpture on Paper at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 19th March 2004, Following the Henry Moore conference, Petherbridge was invited to participate in the international scholars’ study day accompanying the exhibition and publication Sculpter au crayon, Dessins de sculpteurs du XVIIe siècle à nos jours, at the Bibliothèque royale des Belgique, Brussels where she delivered the paper “The Rejection of Matter: Contemporary Drawings and Multi Practice”, 3 December 2004. In different ways, both these papers questioned the standard view that sculptors’ drawings constitute a distinctive and recognisable body of work, and proposes instead the notion of contemporary “multi-practice” and its revolutionary relationship to earlier models of preparatory drawing and studio practice. Questions of practice and the “demise of System” are essential to Petherbridge’s analysis of contemporary drawing contained in the forthcoming trans-historical and thematic study of drawing practice, Drawing: Making and Thinking, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2008. It is hoped that this very comprehensive book will be complemented by a publication of collected essays focussing on contemporary drawing issues, to include “On Models and Mickey Mouse” published in The International Journal of Art & Design Education, Volume 24, No. 2, 2005 (pp126-137) (ISSN 1476-8062 Print and ISSN 1476-8070 Online) Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford and “On the Moving Line and the Future Subjunctive of Drawing in a post-Duchampian Age” in Futures (Journal of Policy Planning & Future Studies), Special Issue Futures of Art, ed. Dr. Juliet Steyn, City University, 2007, Elsiever Publishers, UK & Holland (ISSN 0016-3287). These articles critically address issues of popular culture in the context of social analysis and pedagogy

Two cities two modernities: drawings

"Following Petherbridge’s key-note address to the conference Drawing Connections: The Rôle of Drawing in contemporary Art and Design, College of Fine Arts, UNSW, August 2001 (forthcoming book publication, ed Prof. Michael Esson) she was invited to undertake a visiting professorship at Monash University, 14 July to 27 October 2003, which included funded travel to two conferences, post-graduate tutorials and public lectures in Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart. Her key-note address “Meditations on a Dirty Word” on issues of skill in art and design was delivered to the Annual Conference of the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools at the University of Tasmania(1-4October 2003) (Proceedings published www.acuads.com.au/conf2003/conf2003htm) The studio project part of the residency was a response to the architecture and historic town-planning of Melbourne, and the exhibition (displayed alongside an exhibition of war-site drawings by Paul Gough) included the four meter drawing Taming the Bay 2003, as well as an ironic slide-show response to Melburbia called ‘Law and Order.’ In its investigation of place the exhibition followed the format of Framing LA: A View from the Acropolis, June 2002 which ended Petherbridge’s year as a Scholar in the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles 2001-2002, where in addition to scholarly book research, she undertook a drawing series exploring the contradictory topologies of Los Angeles as a dream city punctuated by disorienting car parks and fly-overs. A similar City project was initiated during her residency at Beaconsfield National University Lahore, Pakistan (October – December 2006). Architectonic drawings from all these series were exhibited in Petherbridge Alone with Soane in Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing (19 January – 3 March 2007) and pieces were acquired by the British Museum. The exhibition accompanied Drawing As Vital Practice,a selection of nine international artists curated by Petherbridge. Both shows were previewed on BBC London News 18 January 2007.

Drawing inspiration

Abstrac

Constructing the language of line

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition John Flaxman 1755-1826: Master of the Purest Line curated by Professor David Bindman at the Sir John Soane’s Museum and University College London, celebrating the restoration of the Flaxman Gallery, UCL in 2003. It included a ‘Flaxman Sculpture trail’ and was timed to coincide with the Conference of the Association of Art Historians hosted at UCL, as well as a project for MA students on the British Museum History of the Print Course.The catalogue was short-listed for the prestigious AXA/Art Newspaper Award 2003, and the exhibitions was well covered in the press. Petherbridge’s chapter incorporated new research (first put out in seminars in the Strang Print Room, UCL) and proposed a reading of Flaxman’s inflected line as more expressive than is usually acknowledged in neo-classical drawing scholarship. This led to her being consulted on Flaxman-influenced drawings by Humbert de Superville in the Accademia, Venice, by Dr. Giovanna Nepi Sciré, Department of Artistic and Cultural Heritage, Venice. These findings impacted directly on Petherbridge’s researches into earlier eighteenth century drawing, and she was invited to lecture on the anatomical drawings of horses by George Stubbs at the National Gallery during the 2005 exhibition Stubbs and the Horse, and participated in a conference and Study Day sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. Following a positive response to these papers, she was awarded a residential fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art from March 5 to April 27 2007, researching into George Stubb’s comparative anatomical drawings and delivering gallery talks in the collection. Researches were also undertaken at Yale Medical School Library on the relationship of Stubbs’ project to 18th century discourses of comparative anatomy, and will be written-up as an extended article for an art-historical journal, with the possibility of being extended further