This is a past event
The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. Join Dr Marcus Jack for an online webinar.
The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. These sessions are aimed at staff and students interested in hearing more about emerging new work within Scottish and Irish Studies. As always the series is highly interdisciplinary with papers from early career scholars in a range of Arts and Humanities disciplines.
24th October: Dr Marcus Jack (Glasgow School of Art) 'Poor Modernism: The counternarratives of Scotland’s contingent artists’ film.'
Artists’ adoption and adaption of film throughout the twentieth century has been underwritten by benevolent pipelines of funding. With the devolution of cultural policy in the UK, recourse to public subsidy for this marginal practice began to develop unevenly, such that Scotland would trail behind its southern counterpart by the measure of decades. Though the artists’ film and its avant-garde pretensions cannot be untethered from an economic, social, and technological context, the relatively few efforts at historicising these practices have resisted contingency as an immutable condition. Surveying the production, exhibition, and circulation of artists’ film Scotland before 1980, this paper exposes a formative correlation between policy, production and the prevailing canon. It finds discrepancies in infrastructure and opportunity that have produced an unwieldy and unreconciled body of filmmaking, peripheral to the organised English avant-garde but which through its strategic negotiation of adverse economies, loopholes and sponsorships has developed a unique character. Through a materialist inspection of organisational archives, collected oral and written testimony, and the films of Norman McLaren, Margaret Tait, Enrico Cocozza, Murray Grigor and Lesley Keen, this paper lays challenge to homogenous national narratives, beckoning a wholesale reconsideration of who and what existent categories of practice uphold.
Dr Marcus Jack is a curator, art historian and Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curation at the University of Exeter. He recently completed a SGSAH Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at The Glasgow School of Art which culminated in CINEMA DESPITE (Tramway, Glasgow, 2023), a major review of artists’ film and video in Scotland featuring the work of twenty-nine artists, filmmakers and collectives spanning a seventy-year period. In 2022 he was a visiting researcher with Archive/Counter-Archive at York University in Toronto and gained his PhD with a thesis surveying the history and context of artists' moving image in Scotland. Jack regularly develops screening events and publications through Transit Arts (2015–) and is the founding editor of the open-access serial DOWSER, notes on artists’ moving image in Scotland (2020–). His research looks for counternarratives in visual culture through analyses of infrastructure, statehood and socio-economics, with particular emphasis on artists’ film and video. He is the guest convenor British Art after Britain, the British Art Network's 2023 Annual Conference.
- Speaker
- Dr Marcus Jack
- Contact
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Seminars are entirely online and can be accessed via Microsoft Teams. If you'd like to receive a link to the event and are not a member of research staff or a research postgraduate student in the schools of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture or Divinity, History, Philosophy, and Art History please contact Dr Sarah Sharp (sarah.sharp@abdn.ac.uk).