Chris Dorsett in writing

conference, lectures, workshops

2023 (May): Curating the Contemporary: Working with Art and Artists at the Pitt Rivers Museum – a day of pop-up talks in the museum. Workshop. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Should ‘contemporary art’ be displayed in an ethnographic museum like the Pitt Rivers? Can a Victorian museum building, containing tens of thousands of objects from communities all over the world, be construed as a contemporary art space? How can working with contemporary art and artists reconfigure or even challenge the histories of a place like the Pitt Rivers Museum? Join us to for a day devoted to exploring these questions and thinking about how concepts and methods from the contemporary artworld might be incorporated into museums of anthropology and vice versa. We present a series of 20 minute pop-up talks by curators and academics who have worked with contemporary artists and artworks in the museum. Speakers will ‘pop up’ in various locations around the museum, often right next to the cases, temporary installations, and exhibitions currently on display. Come along and be part of the conversation!

11.00 - 11.30: Chris Morton, Pitt Rivers Museum
But is it ethnographic?: curating contemporary Australian Aboriginal art in the Pitt Rivers Museum
Location: Clore Balcony cases and screen

11.45 - 12.15: Amy Budd, Modern Art Oxford
Rustling the Archive: Curating Contemporary Art with the Pitt Rivers Museum
Location: Clore Balcony screen

12.30 - 1.00: Chris Dorsett, Research Associate, Pitt Rivers Museum
Items Said to be Artworks
Location: Clore Balcony screen

1.30 - 2.00: David Pratten, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
Curating the ‘Unmasked’ exhibition and Zina Saro-Wiwa’s 'Bad Boys & Broken Hearts' installation
Location: Temporary exhibition space and long gallery

2.15 - 2.45: Marenka Thompson Odlun, Pitt Rivers Museum
The Art of Storytelling: Re-thinking museum interpretation through contemporary works
Location: Cases on first floor? Or Clore Balcony

3.00 - 3.30: Clare Harris, Pitt Rivers Museum and School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
“The Objects Chose Me”: Marina Abramovic at the Pitt Rivers Museum
Location: Abramovic installation and cases in the court

2023 (April): Outside archives? Experimental methods between anthropology and art practice. Conference Lab (co-convenors: Elizabeth Hallam, University of Oxford and Helen Cornish, Goldsmiths). ASA2023: An unwell world? Anthropology in a speculative mode, SOAS, University of London.

This speculative Lab invites participants to creatively engage with two questions: (1) how does the outside (or environments outside of architectures) operate as an archive? And (2) what kinds of research methods can we develop to productively explore the outside as archive? Bringing together theoretical perspectives and methods from anthropology and art practice, the Lab examines these questions through open-ended investigations of a public, accessible area outside the conference buildings (SOAS, London). This area, likely to be a street or park, will be confirmed with Lab participants prior to the conference. Archives are often associated with institutions, buildings and (interior) repositories or collections - but do they extend or emerge beyond these, in different ways? How do traces of life (and death) build up (and decay) outside over time, and might such traces amount to accidental archives? Does the outside accumulate and organise 'documents', and if so how might these residues be deciphered? Does archive-like apparatus such as cataloguing, filing, storage, retrieval etc come into being, persist or disintegrate outside? What kinds of curating (as in taking care) are called for when approaching outsides as archives? Anthropologists have devoted attention to archives as material, paper or digital records, but might archives take radically different, alternative forms in outside environments? The Lab's first part will explore the outside as archive through documentation in different media (writing, drawing, and digital photography/video); and the Lab's second part will consider the epistemological and methodological implications of outside archives for future research and archival practices.

https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/asa2023/p/13276

2023 (March): 9 Bookmarks: Rawson’s writing and the influence of Abhinavagupta. Lecture. J.P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

Lecture two is an analysis of Philip Rawson’s textual references to the aesthetic speculations of Abhinavagupta, which not only influenced the layout of the Tantra exhibition, but also provided a theoretical underpinning for the many art books Rawson wrote throughout his career. He was a very creative museum professional who also thought of himself as an art educator and, from this perspective, he saw art schools as laboratories for the advancement of sensory experience and the amplification of what we now call ‘affect’. In the Tantra exhibition he had (purposely, I think) addressed the experimental aspirations of Western art students, and those of us who thronged the Hayward Gallery were busy reading his latest publications. In particular, Drawing (1969) and Ceramics (1971) were landmarks in their field, and Indian aesthetics are perceptively at work in both books – both entwine passionate explorations of the ‘language’ of these art forms with the sensible, embodied, and numinous values we associate with Abhinavagupta’s philosophical reflections. Consequently, in this second lecture I discuss some of the most theoretical passages in Rawson’s writing at the time he was curating the Hayward show. Over the years, my own copies of Drawing and Ceramics have accumulated impromptu bookmarks made from offcuts of my drawings, and these must figure in the discussion because they are a by-product of my long rumination on Rawson’s educational thinking. A year after the Tantra exhibition closed he joined the staff at the Royal College of Art and became my teacher and mentor. Thus, my account is built upon a great deal of direct knowledge which is, on the one hand, sensitive to the educative significance Rawson attributed to aesthetic encounters, but on the other hand, inflected by an acknowledgement that his books are now placed at some distance from a world that is post-structuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial.

Lecture two was given Thursday 2nd March 2023 and is now available at: https://youtu.be/hTla_1SaWjk

2023 (February): 9 Rooms: Philip Rawson and the exhibiting of tantra. Lecture. J.P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

My lectures are about a leading British authority on Indian art, Philip Rawson (1924-1995). The title of the first presentation refers to the nine enclosed spaces in which the celebrated Tantra exhibition he curated in 1971 was laid out at London’s Hayward Gallery. The arrangement confounded an important modernist conviction that any exhibit worth seeing required a clinically minimal mode of display. The Hayward was a minimal ‘white cube’ but, paradoxically, Rawson gathered hundreds of historical Indian items within confined coloured rooms, and heightened the viewer’s sensory engagement with ambient sound and slide projections. The results were widely held to have had greater contemporary resonance than the concurrent exhibition of new Californian art on the Hayward’s upper floor. The contradiction was not lost on me. As a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art I had gone to see what artists on the west coast of America were doing, but discovered instead, much closer to home, experimental forms of art practice being spectacularly put to work in the service of cultural material usually found in museums. Frustratingly, the Arts Council of Great Britain archive, which holds documents on the commissioning and popular reception of this exhibition, contains no installation photographs; so there is no record of what Tantra actually looked like. As a result, I will set out how the research I am undertaking at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies re-engages with the sensorily-charged enclosures that Rawson derived from the nine emotional states (rasas) described by the tantric sage Abhinavagupta. The impact of Rawson’s tantrism on the London art scene of the early 1970s will be re-appraised, but my real goal is the creation of new practice-based contexts for researching his pioneering exhibition-making. Just over 50 years after Tantra closed I would like to see the show’s curator receive more attention.

Lecture one was given Thursday 16th February 2023 and is now available at: https://youtu.be/2p9CKcDQAk4

2022 (November). Marks in a field / Plus marks in a field. Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Two slide shows presented simultaneously as a single seminar idea. Marks in a field is a slide presentation about my arts-based activities in the 1980s and 1990s at the Pitt Rivers and other museums. Much of what happened was related to the notion of an 'expanded field', a widely employed approach theorised by the art critic Rosalind Krauss in her influential essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979). On this basis I began to reject gallery exhibiting and, as a result, marked out a pedagogically charged 'field' situated between art schools and museums. This presentation recreates the slide talk I developed to do this. In doing so I will be recalling the narratives that conveyed what happened here in Oxford to arts schools and collection-holding institutions in Sweden, Finland, Hong Kong and Brazil. In contrast, Plus marks in a field is a slide sequence that documents the annotated text I am reading aloud as I recreate my talk. The additional slides make visible corrections and variant wordings that would otherwise go unregistered. The idea comes from Rodney Dennis‘s book about reworked manuscripts in the archives of Harvard's Houghton library. Here we 'see' poems in which graphic interventions (an author's crossing out, underlining, or bracketing of their own words) were meant to be interpreted but not actually voiced when read aloud. This insertion of drawn marks into the writing/reading process is the means by which, as a retired professor of fine art who routinely attends the VMMA seminars, I reconsider the art school talk I once used to encourage other artists to engage with the museum sector.

https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/event/marks-field/plus-marks-field

2022 (September): It’s Not Junk - Where Museum Archives Meet Genetic Science. 'Professor Chris Dorsett presents a thought-provoking analogy between Genetic Science and Museum Archives, inspiring us to consider and differentiate between things we can and cannot see.' TEDxBanbury talk independently organized in Oxfordshire using the TED conference format.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nkWUFWiDiw

2021 (March): Doing Harm in Exhibitions. Conference paper, ASA21 Responsibility, University of St Andrews (online). When Alison Wilding’s sculpture Blue-Black collapsed in front of me at the 1984 British Art Show I felt responsible for what had happened. My approach across the gallery floor dislodged the delicately balanced structure, destroying at a stroke the artwork’s adaptation to the environment of the spectator. Like any unpromising pile of materials in a studio, the sudden horizontal disposition of ‘parts’ made it much harder to understand how, of all the sculptures these bits and pieces might have become, Wilding’s arrangement remained the aesthetic optimum. My accidental act of unmaking, occurring as I planned my first interventionist exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, conjured, as if from nowhere, the dead matter out of which the living presence of the art work had been constructed. Unlike Mary Richardson’s attack on the Rokeby Venus in Gell’s Art and Agency, doing harm to Blue-Black prompted in me a lasting awareness of the fragility of artefactual agency. Whereas Richardson confirmed art’s power, Wilding’s sculpture punctured the aesthetic force that keeps art acting upon us.My thoughts often return to this moment and I have recently extended the idea to inanimate materials that were once alive themselves. My new ASMR-style videos, utilising Holly Dugan’s 2019 article, offer a practice-based response to an unsettling juxtaposition of animals drawn on a calf skin manuscript now in the British Library. By transforming this biological artefact into contemporary media, I hope its 17th century approach to ‘harmed life’ achieves aesthetic validity once again.

https://vimeo.com/539033599/d3a958b54c

2021 (March): Re-treading the art school corridor to 'Cast Contemporaries'. Ancient plaster: casting light on a forgotten sculptural material, The British Academy, London (online). ‘Cast Contemporaries’ was an exhibition proposed by the architectural historian Margaret Stewart to mark the completion of the restoration and cleaning of Edinburgh’s historic plaster cast collection. She had overseen this project as the curator of collections at Edinburgh College of Art and, having heard me speak about my work with contemporary art in the museum environment, she invited me to curate an exhibition for the 2012 Edinburgh Arts Festival. There had been conferences and symposia. Historians and classicists had discussed the cultural significance of this truly outstanding accumulation of sculptural and architectural reproductions. But what would artists make of the physical restoration of the casts to the working environment of a major contemporary art school? This paper reports on what happened when the theoretical debates gave way to the creative process of exhibition making and public attention was drawn to the newly conserved presence of the casts.

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/british-academy-conferences/ancient-plaster-casting-light-forgotten-sculptural-material/

https://vimeo.com/534443359/24f8d5399e

2019 (November): Voice-Over: archived narratives and silent heirlooms. Archive Alive research symposium, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

This multimodal presentation is, at present, work in progress. It was initiated after visiting the Tavistock Institute archives in November 2018 and involves audio-visual reconstructions of the acetate recordings my late father made as he encountered ‘civvy street’ following demobilisation in 1946. I have been drawing his records for many years and the project aims to bring together my graphic and media experiments as a single installation piece for display in museum environments (my speciality as an artist-curator). The audio-visual component of the project responds to a report archived with Hugh Murray’s papers (SA/TIH/B/2/1/2/1/3) that was prepared in June 1945 for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). It concerns the psychological problems experienced by people displaced during World War ll. The report contains information that sits poignantly with my father’s ambition to develop an audio postcard service for families with relatives still undertaking military service overseas. He made many test recordings on acetate but these are now in such a fragile state that their content cannot be retrieved, even with the aid of advanced scanning technologies. Thus the records no longer speak for themselves and require other remediating forms of expression. While my drawings were only conceivable because the records remained resolutely mute, the UNRRA report overlays this embodied silence with layers of re-instantiated narrative (the ‘voice-over' of my project title). The latter development is a new departure and the Archive Alive symposium will be an opportunity to screen some of the audio-visual experiments and present a short paper about the project in general. My thinking certainly complicates any straightforward notion of historical contextualisation. I will frame the discussion with reference to three expanding fields of scholarly research that enhance our understanding of the material dimensions of political displacement: 1) art historical accounts of the looting of major museum collections by the Nazis; 2) literary interpretations of displaced objects in the novels of Iris Murdoch (who worked for UNRRA); 3) recent anthropological debates about repatriating ethnographic holdings at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (where I am based as a Research Affiliate). This cross-disciplinary overview, and the art project it elaborates, would not be possible without a widening acceptance that collected and archived objects are never passive reflectors of the society from which they originate. Rather they are themselves generators of meanings simply by being stubbornly present at diverse moments of social transience and change.

2018 (September): Rituals of Refurbishment: remembering/remediating Philip Rawson’s Tantra exhibition. Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), ASA18 Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination: re-creating anthropology, University of Oxford. The recent refurbishment of the Hayward Gallery prompts memories of the Indologist Philip Rawson curating the 1971 Tantra exhibition in what was then London’s key art venue. Our paper remembers and remediates the gallery and the exhibits using rituals recognisable to the Indian diaspora 50 years on.

2018 (June): Static Art and Temporal Imaginings: thinking about Philip Rawson amidst a numinous cast collection. Conference keynote, Lasting Impressions: the roles and perceptions of reproductions in the museum, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Cast collections endure in various institutions and it is the central proposition of this paper that we could do more to activate the layers of time that have been, as it were, imprinted into the monumental bulk of these plaster reproductions. My thought is that Art and Time (2005), the last book written by the art educator and museum curator Philip Rawson, points to this possibility. His analysis of the multiple levels of time evoked by a single static image, Titian’s painting of Bacchus and Ariadne, is an interpretive tour de force that could transform environments like the Ashmolean Museum’s cast gallery into other-worldly regions of time.

2018 (February): OK, this record is my chosen object. Or rather it’s one of my objects. Guest speaker, Gravity:material public lecture series, Sheffield Institute of the Arts, Sheffield Hallam University. When I first heard Sílvia Pérez Cruz’s atmospheric recording of Gallo Rojo I imagined her performing on an expansive wooden floor as noisy and well-worn as those in Carlos Saura's flamenco films. However her YouTube video shows the recording being made in a cellar-like rehearsal room. I have dabbled in experimental music since the 1960s and this paper explores why I misheard what Cruz and her guitarist were doing as they extemporised freely on their instruments.

2017 (October): the train starts – it stops – it starts again (effort, stasis, and the Glasgow Museums Resource
Centre). Conference paper, Doubtful Occasion: A creative symposium based on artist Christine Borland’s research into WW1 objects in Glasgow Museums’ collection, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. Linked to my curated event Thoughts for a journey: a prepared text with passing discussions, a scripted train journey from Glasgow Central Station to the Centre at Nitshill.

2017 (January): On waking up, say a spell backwards. Public seminar. Thinking Tantra (curators - Rebecca Heald with Amrita Jhaveri), Drawing Room, London.

2016 (June): Handling the taste of emotion (Rawson’s Rasa). Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), Presenting the Theatrical Past: interplays of artefacts, discourses and practices, IFTR 2016, Stockholm University.

2016 (May): Revisiting Tantra: contemporary British and Indian responses to the Tantra-oriented songs of Rabindranath Tagore. Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the Jātaka Tales and Buddhism in India Today, SARI 2016 Annual and International Colloquium, University of Paris 13.

2015: Revisiting Tantra: a contemporary British and Indian response to the “seductiveness” of Tantric museum objects. Conference paper (co-author Janaki Nair), The Culture of Seduction [The Seduction of Culture], Cyprus Semiotic Association, University of Cyprus.

2015: Studio Ruins: narrating “unfinishedness”. Conference paper, Material Culture in Action: Practices of making, collecting and re-enacting art and design, Glasgow School of Art.

2014: Negotiating the Icebox: cold collections, dark museums and contemporary art.
Conference paper, Art Out of Time, Institute of Visual Research, University of Oxford.

2014: Museum stores, genetic junk, experimental art – conversations on a train.
Conference paper, ASA14 Decennial: Anthropology and Enlightenment, University of Edinburgh.

2013: At a moment’s notice: according to the pleasure of the holder: the semiotics of paper. Conference keynote, DeSForM 2013, School of Digital Media, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China.

2012: Synaesthetic Presences: new sights from old sound objects. Conference paper, Making Sound Objects: Cultures of hearing, Creating and Circulation, British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

2011: Stilling the flow of signs: creative action and the discontinuity of the museum archive. Conference paper (co-author Sachiyo Goda), Exhibitionary Geographies and the Post-Museum, Royal Geographic Society-IBG Annual International, Royal Geographic Society, Conference, London.

2011: Semiotic Uncertainty and Resonant Presence. Conference paper, Transformations in Art and Culture, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Leiden, Holland.

2010: Stilling the flow of signs: creative action and the discontinuity of the museum archive. Conference paper (co-author Sachiyo Goda), The Everyday Conference, University of Cyprus.

2010: Audience-free practices and the art school panopticon. Conference paper: Art Schools: Inventions, Invective and Radical Possibilities, UCL Art Collections, University College London.

2008: Objects, knowledge and practice-led research. Conference paper for Material Worlds: a radically interdisciplinary conference in honour of Professor Susan Pearce, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.