Dear colleagues,

Please come and join us for the last in the Art of Murder seminar series on 26 May. The event is free, open to all and comes with a glass of wine but please email me at [log in to unmask] to reserve a seat.

All the best, Ricarda Vidal

 

Seminar in Visual Culture 2010: The Art of Murder

Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, Room ST 274
(School of Advanced Study, Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, WC1B 5DN London)

Wednesday 26 May 2010, 6.30pm – 8.00pm

Sarah Sparkes, ‘Never Afraid – Murder at Crimes Town’

An illuminated sign with the words NEVER AFRAID spelt out in fairy lights and pulsating like a slow heartbeat hung over the threshold of a forbidding looking metal door.  This sign was in fact an artwork created for my recent solo exhibition 'Never Afraid' at the North London gallery 'Crimes Town’.  The sign was both a welcome and a challenge to enter and to explore an exhibition that questioned our fears and superstitions.  Part of the work included an installation with a coffin acting as a focal point in place of a TV or fireplace in a domestic living room.  I had also created a series of cursed artworks, which visitors could have free but which came with a curse laid on the work by myself and promising 'misfortune, ill health and an untimely end’.  The show was going well, it received a good review and lots of people visited and were responding to the questions that the work was meant to provoke - the superstitions we cling to to ward off death and our living fear of this great unknown. And then, half way through the exhibition a young man was murdered outside the gallery’s main entrance. Almost overnight the entrance was turned into a shrine, which grew daily in scale and content.  The decision was made by the gallery directors to take down the 'Never Afraid' sign from above this 'real' ritual site and to limit access to the gallery to a side door and by appointment only. Effectively the art was safely isolated and sealed off from the real world, a doorway sealed out of fear or respect for a greater force?
 

Lisa Downing, ‘Monochrome Mirror: Representing Dennis Nilsen’

Perhaps more than any other British serial killer except Jack the Ripper, Dennis Nilsen, a homosexual necrophile strangler, who killed at least 15 young men between 1978 and 1983 in London, has caught the imagination of artists and writers. This paper will explore a series of aesthetic representations of Nilsen, including Dieter Rossi's portrait in oils "Dennis Nilsen" (1993), physical theatre company DV8’s performance of David Hinton’s "Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men" (1989), and the postmodern gothic novel "Exquisite Corpse" (1996) by Poppy Z. Brite. Alongside these cultural products, I will consider extracts from Nilsen's journal and his own sketches. My paper will pursue the argument that the representations created by the murderer, and those created OF the murderer, exist within a continuum. In his journals, Nilsen describes in detail his wishful identification with the corpses he created on the one hand, and his attempts to render them aesthetically pleasing as objects on the other (positioning them, washing them, dressing them, photographing them, drawing them). In the artistic/ literary representations discussed, the figure of Nilsen becomes the art object that is beheld. The represented, fictionalized, mediated Nilsen can be seen to function for the viewer/ reader much as the corpses functioned for Nilsen – as a mirror to an alterity tamed by the processes of (violent, aesthetic) fixing. Nilsen fascinates the artists who portray him, I suggest, because the idea that his project resembles a more extreme, more ethically troubling, version of their own is one deeply ingrained in our cultural imaginary.

 

 

Seminar in Visual Culture 2010: The Art of Murder

This series of seminars acts as a forum for practicing artists, researchers, curators, students, and others interested in visual culture who are invited to present, discuss and explore a given theme within the broad field of Visual Culture.

In 2010, the theme of the seminar is ‘The Art of Murder.’

Artists and writers have always been fascinated with the violence of murder and the thrill and sensationalism that comes with it. Many examine it in critical, theoretical or creative forms of expression exploring the hidden fears and desires inherent in breaking the most sacred taboo, the destruction, and thereby for some the renewal, of life itself.

Thomas de Quincey considered ‘murder as one of the fine arts’, and the murderer as artist, in his eponymous satirical article from 1827. W.H. Auden calls murder ‘negative creation’; and like the classical rebel-poet/artist Auden’s murderer is ‘the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent.’ According to legend George Bataille dallied in a more dangerous fashion with the artistic act of murder.

Today, artworks by serial killer John Wayne Gacy fetch up to $15,000 at auction. In the Washington-based Museum of Crime and Punishment one can admire art and craft made by Charles Manson and an online search will provide opportunities to purchase one of his sock puppets. Marcus Harvey’s portrait of child-murderess Myra Hindley, which was created from the hand-prints of children, attracted much criticism, but it also drew the crowds.

When crime writer Patricia Cornwell cut up a painting by Walter Sickert in her quest to prove that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, the art-world was outraged. However, whether we believe Cornwell’s theory or not, Sickert’s paintings suddenly acquired a new fascination.

This cross-disciplinary seminar series ‘The Art of Murder’ sets out to explore visual representations of actual murder in fine art, theatre, film and literature, as well as our relationship with artefacts and artworks created by criminals. 

 

Programme:
(for detailed programme see the website: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/index.php?id=434)

Wednesday 27 Jan. 2010, 6.30pm – 8.00pm

Ricarda Vidal, “A brief introduction to murder”

Geraldine Swayne, “On Painting Murder”

Simon Bacon, The Two Faces of the Murderous Gaze: The Dark Doubling of Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula as Seen in “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump” by Wright of Derby and “Triptych May-June 1973” by Francis Bacon

 

Wednesday 24 Feb. 2010, 6.30pm – 8.00pm

Roger Cook, Murder, Myth and Martyrdom: the Death of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Leila Peacock, “ Dis-moi ce que tu manges…” – The Cannibal’s Cookbook

 

Wednesday 24 March 2010, 6.30pm – 8.00pm  

Brittain Bright, “The Aesthetic of the Crime Scene Photograph”

Julia Banwell, “True Crime: Looking at Violent Death in Mexican Visual Culture”

 

Wednesday 26 May 2010, 6.30pm – 8.00pm

Sarah Sparkes, “Never Afraid – Murder at Crimes Town”

Lisa Downing, “Monochrome Mirror: Representing Dennis Nilsen”