Art Pilgrimage: stained glass walking tour of Cork

Tomorrow, the Glucksman Gallery, as part of their current exhibition on the work of Josef Albers,  will be hosting a stained glass walking tour of Cork to include the Honan Chapel and St. Finnbarre's Cathedral.
Visit exhibition page.

James Cronin, University College Cork, will be speaking on the stained glass of Harry Clarke and the Honan Chapel. Meet at the entrance to the Glucksman Gallery, UCC, at 1pm, 1st June 2012.

To book a place please contact

Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland


T: + 353 21 4901844

E: info@glucksman.org

Staff Research Spotlight -- Kirstie North who teaches on the certificate and diploma programmes in European art History at Cork

Kirstie North is a doctoral student in History of Art at Cork. She is a successful visual artist.  


Click on the image to open the invitation

Staff Research Spotlight -- John Paul McMahon who teaches on the certificate and diploma programmes in European art History at Cork

JP McMahon is a doctoral student in History of Art at Cork. He is a prize-winning  proprietor chief in Cava, Galway city 


My PhD research examines the work of performance and conceptual artist Vito Acconci (b.1940). Acconci’s work is important for contemporary art for a number of reasons, in particular expanding our definition of what we consider art to be (both materially and intellectually) and also in the ways that he has shown us that single works can be reconfigured many times to not only produce other new works, but to show how an art object develops over time. This latter point is perhaps the most important as we now, as art histories, how to take into account the temporality of the work, as opposed to its singular instance. What I mean by this is that we all know when and where Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa (date) but the work itself has a history and its meaning is not tied to the originary moment of the artist’s conception or production of the work. When the King of France hung the painting is his bathroom it meant something very different to its current status behind bulletproof glass in the Louvre.


Acconci’s work is typical of art made during this period in the way that he uses his body as the object of his art in order to explore some specific idea. Following Piece is a good example of this. It was an activity that took place every day on the streets of New York, between October 3rd and 25th, 1969. It was part of other performance and conceptual events sponsored by the Architectural League of New York that occurred during those three weeks. The terms of the exhibition “Street Works IV” were to do a piece, sometime during the month, that used a street in New York City. So Acconci decided to follow people around the streets and document his following of them. But why would he do this? Why would Acconci follow random people around New York? In essence, Following Piece was concerned with the language of our bodies, not so much in a private manner, but in a deeply public manner. By selecting a passer-by at random until they entered a private space, Acconci submitted his own movements to the movements of others, showing how our bodies are themselves always subject to external forces that we may or may not be able to control.


In terms of the art work, rather than being just another object that we look at in the gallery, Following Piece was part of the revolution that took place in the art world in the late 1960s that tried to bring art out of the gallery and into the street in order to explore real issues such as space, time, and the human body. Many artists, such as Acconci, used their bodies as their chosen medium.  All of these ideas were influenced by Acconci’s readings. As many other artists of the period, Acconci wanted to get away from specific art problems and engage with social problems. Acconci read books such as Edward Hall’s The Hidden Dimension (1969), Erving Goffmann’s The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life (1959), and Kurt Lewin’s In Principles of Topological Psychological (1936/1966). All of these books explored the ways in which the individual and the social are interlinked in terms of complex codes that structure the way we act and live every day.


Ironically, for all the effort to get out of the gallery, much of Acconci’s documentation of Following Piece, for example, the texts, photographs (which were taken after the event!), and diagrams, now constitutes a work of art in its own right. MOMA owns several of the photographs of Following Piece and other “versions” of this work are also in existence. So, even though Acconci’s Following Piece was a performance that occurred in a very specific period (3rd to 25th October, 1969), the reproduction and circulation of the work continues. As I said in my opening, this fact not only teaches us important things about the nature of performance art and its relationship to the art world, but also how the context of the art work is also never exactly fixed and each time it is presented something new occurs with the work itself.

Shakespeare's Restless World

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, explores the world of Shakespeare and his audience through twenty objects from that turbulent period. Mondays to Fridays 1.45pm; 7.45pm on BBC Radio 4 visit Homepage

The Sacred Modernist: Josef Albers (1888-1976)

The Sacred Modernist: Josef Albers as a Catholic Artist


Curated by Nicholas Fox Weber until 8 July 2012 at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork


Visit exhibition site The Sacred Modernist


Josef Albers, one of the most influential artist-educators of the twentieth century, was a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany during the 1920s. In 1933 he came to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, Albers was the first living artist ever to be given a solo retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Josef Albers's Interaction of Colour is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers's unique ideas of colour experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, the publication first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative colour studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.

Albers's work represents a transition between traditional European art and the new American art. It incorporated European influences from the constructivists and the Bauhaus movement, and its intensity and smallness of scale were typically European. But his influence fell heavily on American artists of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Abstract painters drew on his use of patterns and intense colors, while Op 
artists and conceptual artists further explored his interest in perception.

Sean Scully, like Albers, sees his art as imbued with an elemental spirituality.

  

Art History at Adult Continuing Education

Reserve your place on European Art History certificate and diploma programmes.

Links to new courses will be posted as soon as booking is open.

Introducing Short Courses: The Culture of the Big House

The Culture of the Big House is one of over 70 short courses offered by the Centre for Adult Continuing Education.This year, to mark its growing popularity, the Centre, in association with the Irish Heritage Trust, located the course in Fota House and Garden, Co Cork. As a new setting of the course, Fota House has proved highly successful in terms of overall student experience and learning. The course attracted over 20 participants and the lecturing staff is drawn from the Centre for Adult Continuing Education, the School of English and the School of History, UCC. The Centre plans to extend its relationship with the Trust in developing future educational opportunities in this wonderful venue.