London Studio Research Articles

Fulfilling his debt to civilization: American filmmaker Harold Marvin Shaw, British wartime propaganda, and the anti-Bolshevik The Land of Mystery, 1914–1920

ABSTRACT The Land of Mystery (1920) was a melodrama movie based on a fictionalized life of Vladimir Lenin, made by the American filmmaker Harold Marvin Shaw. Shaw had previously made drama films with wartime propaganda content in Britain and South Africa. The Land of Mystery was financed by Russian exile Boris Said, and the story was written by Basil Thomson, Britain’s Director of Intelligence. It was partly filmed in a rush on location in war-torn Lithuania, as well as in a London studio. When it was exhibited, The Land of Mystery (1920) was described in The Bioscope trade journal as having ‘caused more discussion than any British film of the last five years’. However, no copy of the film survives. This article reconstructs the circumstances in which the film was made, and suggests that Shaw was compromised by the prejudices of Thomson and Said.

INSIDE OUT

AbstractThis text was written in response to a commission from Berliner Festspiele/MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues 2021. Juliet Fraser collaborated with filmmaker Jessie Rodger to create an experimental video essay that layered raw footage of Juliet in her erstwhile London studio space, reading her own words, reflecting on the words of others and doing her singing practice. The result offered a glimpse into one artist's efforts to remain creative and connected during the time of Covid. What follows is the written essay; the full video essay, Inside Out, can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=m96xf41-_PA.

ROLE OF BIOMARKERS IN EPILEPTOGENESIS: A CONCISE REVIEW

Epilepsy is a gathering of ongoing neurological problems described by intermittent, unconstrained, and unusual seizures. It is one of the most widely recognized neurological messes, influencing a huge number of individuals around the world. A biomarker is characterized as a dispassionately estimated normal for an ordinary or obsessive natural interaction. Recognizable proof and legitimate approval of biomarkers of epileptogenesis, the improvement of epilepsy, and ictogenesis, the affinity to create unconstrained seizures, may foresee the improvement of an epilepsy condition; recognize the presence and seriousness of tissue equipped for producing unconstrained seizures; measure movement after the condition is set up; furthermore, decide pharmacoresistant. Such biomarkers could be utilized to make creature models for more savvy screening of potential antiepileptogenic and antiseizure medications and gadgets and to lessen the expense of clinical preliminaries by enhancing the preliminary populace and going about as proxy markers to abbreviate the preliminary span. The destinations of the biomarker subgroup for the London Studio were to characterize approaches for distinguishing conceivable biomarkers for these reasons. Examination to recognize dependable biomarkers may likewise uncover basic instruments that could serve as helpful focuses for the improvement of new antiepileptogenic and antiseizure compounds.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Francis Bacon painted pictures based mostly on photographs published in encyclopaedias, popular magazines, the tabloid press, posters and packaging. He was interested in reproductions of paintings by great masters. He used photographs by Muybridge. Photographs, treated by Bacon as tools, were later “worked on” by the artist, becoming the canvas for his paintings. The scenes he chose – often drastic, depicting rape and violence – were painted into his canvases, creating a deformed image of the world that “emerged” from the horrors of both world wars. He painted portraits based on his photographs of friends. These were usually people with whom the artist was emotionally connected. He painted self-portraits base on a series of photographs taken in automatic photography, from which he selected several to form the basis of his paintings. Real things and persons should exist in the fictional space assigned to them. By destroying literalism in painting, Bacon wanted to find the similarity desired in painting as its principal, so to rediscover realism. When painting a portrait, he tried to capture the appearance of the figure. After Francis Bacon’s death, his London studio (7, Reece Mews), restored by conservators, was “repeated” in the space of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. It contains about 7,500 objects, among them numerous photographs which had been torn up by the artist, photographs of his lovers and friends, black and white reproductions. The Bacon ‘archive’ collected in Dublin is now a silent hint of the creative process of the artist, who despite numerous studies devoted to him and recorded conversations, still remains one of the most inscrutable artists of the 20th century.

Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier: Three Decades, Four Moments

‘Three Decades, Four Moments’ is based on two interviews that took place in 2016 and 2017 with the artists Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier in their studio in London. The text foregrounds a number of works by Phaophanit/Oboussier, signalling four ‘moments’ in their artistic practice over several decades, at turns identified (and resisted) as individual, collective and collaborative. In these, we may find coincidences, correspondences and divergences from the three (or four) ‘moments’ in Stuart Hall's essay: moments that interrogate the space of the ‘international’; that complicate the ‘problem space’ of the 1980s; and that inhabit what Zeigam Azizov, cited by Hall, calls ‘“the migration paradigm” – boundaries and border crossings, liminal and disrupted places, voyaging and displacement, fault lines’. Works discussed include: Neon Rice Field (1993); Line Writing (1994); Atopia (1997 and 2003); All That's Solid Melts into Air (Karl Marx) (2005–6); and It Is As If (2015).

On the verge of the tactile. A conversation with Richard Sennett

In his London studio at Shaffron Hill, Richard Sennett shares his current concerns, from the transformation processes taking place in our cities, to the very future of our planet. The scope of Sennett’s thinking – encompassing everything from buildings themselves, to cities, to territories – focuses in this conversation around issues such as gentrification, tourism, urban borders and boundaries, and his desire for a more ‘tactile’ urbanism. His reflections attract the attention not only of architects but also of urban designers, sociologists, geographers and environmental engineers, addressing as they do, key themes such as the dangers of social homogenization, the forces of capitalism and the consequences of climate change. The interview clearly illustrates the shift in Sennett’s interest from urbanism per se, to the broader question of climate change and environmental sustainability.

Capoeira: An exploration of animism and the representation of the spirit through ethnographic animation

This study investigates the relationships between ethnographic study and animation practice, focusing on the Brazilian martial art, capoeira, often referred to as a dance, fight and game. This approach was adopted to explore the ways animation can be placed in relation to both historical and more recent critical theory. A local capoeira community group based in South East London participated in the study for a period of twelve months. The respondents were a combination of teachers and learners, and semi-structured interviews in the form of a conversational style were conducted with several participants. The Capoeira music was composed remotely in collaboration with a capoeira practitioner and a professional berimbau instrumentalist, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Additional music was recorded in a studio in London by main subject of this study, Professor Saruê. Practice-based investigations are currently in development, consisting of footage recorded on 16 mm black-and-white negative film. Direct animation and scratch film were created using 16 mm black leader and 35 mm film, forming a series of animated experiments. The ethnographic methods later revealed a strong connection between capoeira and the Brazilian religion of Candomblé, and attempts to determine how animation can be used to represent the phenomenon of the spirit. Evaluation and reflection of animation practice revealed a strong relationship between ethnography and animation, a relatively new area with promising developments and scope for further research within visual anthropology. Further research is needed to identify other factors that could strengthen the effectiveness of this methodology. The practice-based components of the overall study revealed the potential for in depth fieldwork, overseas travel and longitudinal study spanning the space of one to two years. This would expand a relatively small yet emerging area of academic research.

Awareness through art [city air pollution

THE BOOK ‘Brave New World’ really influenced me when was a youngster, says Dr Jasmine Pradissitto as she takes me on a tour of her south London studio. I can see that we're going down that road, she adds, referring to a world more hopeful and expressing how humans, in years to come, have the ability to evolve above the dystopian views highlighted in the 1932 novel.

The Shadowy Thickening of Space and Time with Chance: An Interview with the Quay Brothers

After studying at the Philadelphia College of Art, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay moved to London in the 1960s to study Graphic Design at the Royal College of Art. They soon acquired a taste for Eastern European animation and puppetry, and subsequently embarked on a 35‐year career making films. Usually working in stop‐motion, the Quay Brothers have evolved one of the most recognisable styles in the history of film, as reflected by their massive 2012 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Mark Morris, Head of Teaching and Learning at the Architectural Association, and Guest‐Editor Neil Spiller interviewed them in their studio in London.

Adam Smith’s ‘Impartial Spectator’ and John Webber’s Ship Cove

New Zealand’s South Island came into view on 10 February 1777 and for the fifth time in seven years James Cook made for a familiar location Ship Cove. It was a location from which he had observed the changes over time of its inhabitants and we can imagine the expedition artist, John Webber, busying himself with sketches of this new place and the people who lived in it. Eleven years later, in his London studio, in part from memory Webber composed Ship Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound. But, according to critics, Webber’s painting exhibits nothing of the significance of his cross-cultural encounter. In contrast I want to suggest that Adam Smith’s concept of the ‘impartial spectator’ provides us with a key to the enigma of Ship Cove just as it would seem a perfect fit for the enigma of James Cook, described by his biographer as exhibiting a compassionate and controlled imagination.

Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists

Previous articleNext article FreeAcquisitionsBen Buchanan Photographs of ArtistsMary SavigMary Savig Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis story begins on April 23, 1985, at Mr. Chow restaurant on East 57th Street, in Manhattan. Dozens of artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andy Warhol, had gathered for a dinner hosted by the owners of Area—a downtown nightclub known for its immersive and idiosyncratic environments—in advance of an upcoming “Art” theme there (see section opener and fig. 1). Ben Buchanan (b. 1958), Area’s official photographer, has donated to the Archives twelve photographs documenting these events, several of which highlight the activities of the gender-bending performer and artists’ muse Bernard Zette, who helped bring the nightclub’s elaborate installations to life.fig. 1. Ben Buchanan, “Jean Michel Basquiat [and] Benjamin Liu 1985 at Mr. Chows NYC.” Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.During Area’s brief existence (1983–1987) Zette assumed the guise of dozens of characters, from Marie Antoinette to Cleopatra to a mermaphrodite (a hermaphrodite mermaid). At Mr. Chow, he transformed himself into a human guestbook by acquiring many of the diners’ signatures on his coral-hued unitard. “I positioned myself in the entry vestibule and somehow coerced everyone to sign their names,” he recalled in a 2015 email to Buchanan. Alex Katz signed the chest, and Julian Schnabel (who crashed the party) initialed just below. Stefano and Dennis Oppenheim signed the right thigh. David Hockney added his name along the right hip. Kenny Scharf doodled a face over the pelvis. Basquiat embellished his signature (which graced the back of both legs) with a trademark symbol. William Wegman sketched a small dog with a halo on the left foot. Warhol signed under the left arm. And Keith Haring drew one of his dancing figures on the rear end.Weeks later, Zette posed again as a human guestbook to kick off the “Art” theme at Area. At the opening event, and periodically throughout the theme’s six-week run, he draped himself over the open pages of a large book made of foam, posing to display the artists’ signatures on his unitard (fig. 2). Zette later sold the garment and it eventually made its way to a gallery in Japan, where it was purchased by its current owner, an anonymous collector in Sweden. In 2015, Buchanan photographed the unitard in his London studio, and these images are included in his gift to the Archives.fig. 2. Ben Buchanan, “Bernard ‘Zette’ human guestbook on display at AREA 1985 NYC” (detail). Ben Buchanan Photographs of Artists, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.Buchanan’s collection of photos help contextualize a more formal portrait of the dinner guests at Mr. Chow, taken by photographer Michael Halsband and donated to the Archives by Dennis Oppenheim in 1996. Indeed, it was this very portrait that prompted the Swedish collector to share with me the story of Zette’s unitard. More broadly, Buchanan’s 1985 photographs document many of the art world luminaries who expanded the boundaries of pop art by merging art with everyday life. His images compliment the Archives’ existing holdings of personal papers, gallery records, and oral history interviews with artists who attended the events at Mr. Chow and Area, including Hockney, Oppenheim, Warhol, Wegman, and LeRoy Nieman, among many others. Notes Mary Savig is the curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 56, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692641 © 2017 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Painting Revolution: John Trumbull and Artistic Exchange between America and France

For both French and American artists, there was an initial interest in depicting the events of the American Revolution in the 1780s, followed by a later wave of art in the 1820s and ’30s. This paper examines the timeline, politics and artistic parameters shaping this art, which was both documentary and symbolic in nature, with artists building on one another’s work. For John Trumbull it was only with time and the buffer of a second war with Britain, the War of 1812, that he was able to obtain a government commission, but his later paintings of the American Revolution were essentially enlarged versions of his compositions from the 1780s. Trumbull studied in the London studio of Benjamin West and was heavily influenced by contemporary British painting. Yet French art and culture were also influential, and this relationship has not been sufficiently studied. Trumbull travelled to France a number of times, beginning in 1786, when he met Jacques-Louis David, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, Jean-Antoine Houdon and other important French artists, incorporating aspects of David’s compositions into his own work. It was also in Paris that Trumbull began to compose the Declaration of Independence under the guidance of Thomas Jefferson. Like most Americans, Trumbull initially supported the French Revolution and saw parallels between it and the American Revolution. He intended to paint early scenes from the French Revolution, including the fall of the Bastille. But although he sympathized with Jefferson and the French republican philosophers, shifting politics and the violence of the French Revolution turned his opinion by 1793.

Scratch nights and hash-tag chats: creative tools to enhance choreography in the higher education dance curriculum

This paper reports on a focused collaborative learning and teaching research project between the Dance Department at Middlesex University and partner institution London Studio Centre. Informed by Belinda Allen’s research on creative curriculum design, dance students and lecturers shared innovative learning opportunities to enhance the development of the creative dance graduate. The key motivation was to explore practices in the modules on both institutions’ undergraduate programmes in which choreography is located. Interdisciplinary, peer and audience discussions surrounding students’ work were fostered during Scratch nights and via hash-tag chats on Twitter. In this discussion we demonstrate that these discursive and participatory practices have value for future dance artists entering the professional field. We evaluate the research outcomes with focus on language, critical confidence and risk taking with the view of better shaping students’ overall learning opportunities in a collaborative dance network to support their individual development as artists.

Emergence: How Insect Illustrations Evolve under Carim Nahaboo’s Artistic Hand

On a spare desk in a communal studio in central London, an elaborate insect slowly emerges from a blank page. The office space bustles with other freelance illustrators, designers, and animators, b...

FRAMING GERTRUDE: PHOTOGRAPHIC NARRATION AND THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE ARTIST-OBSERVER IN LEVY’STHE ROMANCE OF A SHOP

In Amy Levy's 1888 novel,The Romance of a Shop, four orphaned sisters, the Lorimers, open a photography studio in London and struggle to find business and a balance between free expression and propriety. Certainly, the sisters’ commercial involvement with photography can be read as artistic and unconventional for women of the time, but their position as artist-observers sometimes seems to relegate them to a space behind the lens and behind the window that divides their apartment from the society they look out upon. It is from that position as photographer-observer that Gertrude, the most introspective and yet most socially conscious of the sisters, wields her perceptive powers, her piercing gaze. Photography, and the way in which it influences her mode of observing, gives Gertrude an accurate, superior vision and a kind of social agency; but that gaze is negatively mediated by photography, too, filtered by the machine.

What passes for reality

In an attempt to rid himself of a case of writer’s block, Herman Orff is having his head zapped by an old friend in an obscure basement studio in London’s Soho. However, instead of finding inspiration for a new novel, he begets the blind, green-slimed, barnacled head of the Orpheus of Greek mythology, which rises up out of the sea. Herman instantly realizes that the head is a mere hallucination; but that insight does not enable him to ignore it. Whether he’s wandering the streets of London, travelling the Circle and District Lines, hooking up with girlfriends old and new, attempting to breathe new life into Page One of his novel-to-be, or embarking on a trip to Den Haag, the Netherlands, in search of the girl in a Vermeer painting, the head keeps popping up at unexpected and often embarrassing moments. Each time, he is forced to turn his attention to some untold aspect of its non-chronological, mythical tale of love, loss, music and death which—not unsurprisingly, given the hallucinatory nature of the head—displays numerous parallels with Herman’s own life story and current situation. ![Graphic][1] Herman Orff is, of course, the protagonist of Russell Hoban’s cult classic The Medusa Frequency . And, like so many of Mr Hoban’s fictional characters, he takes us on a journey involving splendidly wrought, hyper-kinetic and often darkly humorous adventures in that border area between the mundane and the fantastic. In Mr Hoban’s universe, nothing is ever ordinary. Herman Orff may well be aware of that fact when early on in the narrative he sighs: ‘No, what passes for reality seems to me mostly a load of old rubbish invented by not very inventive minds. The reality that interests me is strange and flickering and haunting’ (Hoban, 1987, p. 8). Russell Hoban (1925–2011) did not … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif

Blowing Hot

The article describes the author’s experience of a day-long class in glassblowing at a studio in London. It draws out a number of analytic themes in making sense of the pedagogy and the learning experience. The article also makes explicit comparison with the work of Erin O’Connor, who has also studied glassblowing at a studio in the United States. Conclusions are drawn simultaneously about the stability of the craft and pedagogy of glassblowing, and also about the craft of ethnography itself.

Eileen Agar at Home: Domesticity, Surrealism, and Subversion

ABSTRACTThis article examines the work of Eileen Agar, one of several women to participate in the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, as a patron of modern design and an originator of remarkable assemblages, costumes, and interiors. In 1932, Agar, a wealthy, Slade-trained painter and patron of the arts, took possession of a London studio flat remodeled for her by the architect Rodney Thomas. This place–customized by Agar later that decade–was instrumental in Herbert Read's decision to include her in the exhibition. The decor of Agar's studio flat, with its dense mosaic of images and objects, contrasted with approaches to interior decoration in 1930s England and embodied a critique of both old and new modes of domesticity. This article suggests that the domestic interior, with its Victorian associations of privacy and family life, a place redolent of hidden secrets, was of great interest to English Surrealists. It also explores the ways in which Agar–an upper-class beauty whose participation in the Surrealist exhibition fascinated the press–deftly took advantage of the publicity she attracted in order to parody the preoccupation of the contemporary debutante and society hostess with furnishing, dress, and entertaining, and to provide a subversive reconfiguration of it.

The Return of John Moffat

The Return of John Moffat

Matthäus Merian El Joven, pintor en el taller de Van Dyck: a propósito de un lienzo con Vertumno y Pomona identificado

The painting of Vertumnus and Pomona , signed “MMerian pinxit,” is a new contribution to Matthaus Merian the Younger’s oeuvre. This discovery offers an occasion to call attention to the artist, whose presence from 1639 in Anton van Dyck’s London studio has been overlooked. Analyses of style and sources of inspiration suggest coincidences with two other very vandyckian painters, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert and Peeter Thijs, which disclose a most interesting circuit of influences and interconnections in the shadow of Van Dyck, under whose impact their styles took shape. Thus, in search of more light on the master’s relatively unknown London studio, the circumstances in which the young Merian came into contact with Van Dyck are reconstructed, while suggesting a virtual meeting with Peeter Thijs.