Events

The OU Library and Archives, led by Ruth Cammies, University Archivist

Non-members: please contact Amy Jane Barnes or Amanda Sciampacone for a Teams invite.

In person event for members. Details to be confirmed.

Work in progress seminar: Dr Margit Thofner, Art History

The remnants of medieval and early modern processional giants – originally made for festivals which were simultaneously civic and religious – often now languish in local civic museums, devoid of their original liveliness, no longer able to evoke their many and complex meanings. What was that liveliness about and how might it successfully be conveyed to contemporary audiences?

Details to be confirmed. All welcome. Please contact Amy Jane Barnes for the MS Teams link.

Work in progress seminar: Dr Amy Jane Barnes, Art History

This work in progress seminar will introduce Amy’s current and ongoing research into collections of Cultural Revolution-era Chinese ceramics in UK museums.

All welcome. Please contact Amy Jane Barnes for the MS Teams link.

Work in progress seminar: Dr Lindsay Polly Crisp, Art History

This ‘work in progress’ paper will scope out a possible book project on the fragment, as it appears in shards of broken things, house dust, and particulate matter. In this project I hope to develop, through a series of contextual studies, an overarching analysis of the fragment as an entity that facilitates an expanded engagement with material objects and their contexts. The fragment has often been analysed in terms of the passing of time, connection with a previous whole, and contextual continuities and disjunctures that produce new meanings. Additionally, in the space of the home, fragments and dust are frequently read, following the well-known anthropologist Mary Douglas, as ‘matter out of place’ (1966/2002, p. 44).

More recently air pollution, and microplastics that ‘escape’ into the environment, have brought particulate matter into focus again as a worrying variety of unruly matter that is frequently not visible to the eye, in ways that invite a political analysis of the moments when we do, and do not, assign agency – and visibility - to the material world. Finally, in previous research on Michael Landy’s art event Break Down (2001) in which the artist catalogued and then systematically dismantled and granulated all 7227 of his personal belongings, I argue that in dissecting objects such as his CD/Radio/Cassette Stereo, Landy challenges commodity fetishism by undermining objects’ apparent wholeness, bringing into view not only their material composition, but the fact that they have been made (Crisp 2018, pp.59-96; 2021).

All welcome. Please contact Amy Jane Barnes for the MS Teams link.

In person event for members in London to visit the free exhibition Chinese and British (co-curated by the OU’s Dr Alex Tickell) at the British Library.

Book Launch of Sam Aylett’s forthcoming book Legacies of an Imperial City, the Museum of London 1976-2007, Senate House, London.