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Downloaded on 2017-02-12T09:34:40Z Title Pedem referens: art historical memory and the analogue in the work of Tacita Dean, Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer Author(s) Kirstie, North Publication date 2016 Original citation North, K. 2016. Pedem referens: art historical memory and the analogue in the work of Tacita Dean, Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer. PhD Thesis, University College Cork. Type of publication Doctoral thesis Rights © 2016, Kirstie North. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Embargo information No embargo required Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/3103 from Downloaded on 2017-02-12T09:34:40Z PEDEM REFERENS ART HISTORICAL MEMORY AND THE ANALOGUE IN THE WORK OF TACITA DEAN, JEREMY MILLAR AND LUCY SKAER Kirstie North Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctorate of Philosophy National University of Ireland, University College Cork History of Art March 2016 Head of Department and Internal Supervisor: Dr. Flavio Boggi External Supervisor: Dr. Edward Krčma In memory of my sister Michelle. CONTENTS Declaration ......................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. iv INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 Art Ex Nihilo ............................................................................................................ 8 The Real Index ....................................................................................................... 17 Chapter Summaries ................................................................................................ 28 CHAPTER ONE: JEREMY MILLAR ...................................................................... 36 The Psychotic Archive: Mnemosyne Atlas, 1924–9 ............................................... 46 Orpheus and Traumatic Memory ....................................................................... 49 A Crisis of Memory ........................................................................................... 60 The Anxious Archive: The Man Who Looked Back, 2010 ..................................... 64 Orpheus and Melancholia .................................................................................. 68 Neurosis and the Psychopathology of Gesture ................................................... 74 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 84 Figures 1.1 – 1.21 ................................................................................................... 87 CHAPTER TWO: TACITA DEAN ........................................................................... 98 Silence: Marcel Broodthaers, Section Cinéma, 1971– 2 ...................................... 106 Chance and Silence .......................................................................................... 108 Art Historical Memory and the Sea Voyage .................................................... 117 i Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), 2002 .................................... 126 Silent Ships ....................................................................................................... 130 Sinking Ships ................................................................................................... 134 The Silence of the Lost Object ......................................................................... 139 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 143 Figures 2.1 – 2.19. ................................................................................................ 146 CHAPTER THREE: LUCY SKAER ....................................................................... 157 Leonora Carrington’s Corpses and Cadavers ....................................................... 163 Lucy Skaer and The Passion of Indifference ....................................................... 169 Death and Nothingness .................................................................................... 177 Death and the Analogue ................................................................................... 188 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 199 Figures 3.1 – 3.25. ................................................................................................ 202 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 214 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 222 Appendix .............................................................................................................. 239 ii DECLARATION I declare that the thesis submitted is all my own work and has not been submitted for another degree at University College Cork or elsewhere. ...................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Ed Krčma for his unwavering support for my research. His guidance, knowledge and patience were crucial to the development of this project. I would also like to thank Dr. Flavio Boggi and Dr. Sabine Kriebel for their encouragement and insightful comments during the research process. I would like to thank Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer for their generosity in interviews and for providing images of their artworks. I would like to thank my close friends, Latin scholar Aryn Penn for translating original texts and for providing insight into the writings of Virgil and Ovid, and Editor Siobhan O’Se for proof reading and providing structural advice on the final draft. I would also like to thank Dr. Mary Healy and Dr. Michael Waldron for reading final versions of chapters. I would like to extend a special thanks to my husband James L Hayes for supporting me both emotionally and financially throughout this process. iv INTRODUCTION PEDEM REFERENS And now, on his way home, he had avoided every pitfall, and Eurydice, restored to him and trailing close behind (as Prosperina had decreed), was emerging into heaven’s atmosphere when a stroke of madness caught him, who loved her, off his guard– a pardonable offence, you’d think, if the Dead knew how to pardon. He stopped, and for a moment wasn’t thinking-no!– Eurydice was his again and on the brink of light, and who knows what possessed him but he turned back to look.1 Book four of Virgil’s Georgics, 29 BC, tells the tragic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, who are parted by death when Eurydice is bitten by a seven-headed serpent on their wedding day.2 A bereaved Orpheus descends into the underworld to try and retrieve her by singing sorrowful lamentations. The power of his song, his art, permits Orpheus to lead Eurydice back from darkness and death, on the condition that he walks in front of her and doesn’t look back until they both reach the upper world. The most poignant part of the poem, quoted above, depicts the 1 Peter Fallon, trans., The Georgics of Virgil (Meath, Ireland: The Gallery Press, 2004), 114. 2 Eurydice gets bitten whilst fleeing from the advances of another man on the day of her wedding to Orpheus. This figure is named by Virgil as Aristaeus (ibid.,113). 1 moment at which a grief-stricken Orpheus loses Eurydice a second time because he anxiously looks back at her. Orpheus’s apprehensive backward glance is a metaphor for irreconcilable loss, the persistence of memory and a paradoxical inability to reclaim the past. In this thesis, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is aligned with three contemporary British artworks which present the look back as a metaphor for a type of memory entwined with loss. Each artwork turns to face elusive and troubling aspects of subjectivity that have their roots in loss and open onto a loss of meaning. These three projects by Tacita Dean, Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer have not received any sustained critical attention. Collectively these three artworks are representative of a new and unexplored turn in contemporary British art, which pursues unpresentable aspects of psychic life by recalling art historical memory. Jeremy Millar’s The Man Who Looked Back, 2010, presents numerous reproductions of artworks depicting the second death of Eurydice, which span centuries of art history (Figure 1.1). Millar replicates Orpheus’s journey by venturing into the past to shed light on overshadowed aspects of art historian Aby Warburg's legacy, restaging his seminal archive The Mnemosyne Atlas 1924–9. Aligning with the melancholic narrative of Warburg’s model of art history, which focused on art’s visual representations of disturbed psychic states that manifest themselves in the body, Millar uses photographic reproductions to focus on the dramatic moment of Eurydice’s second death as witnessed by a traumatised Orpheus. Through representations of bodily gestures that signify death, return and retrieval The Man Who Looked Back documents failed attempts at reclaiming the past and an all- pervading sense of loss. We find the physical journey of Orpheus at play again in Tacita Dean’s passage into the underworld, the dark and cavernous basement visited in her film 2 Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers), 2002. In another failed attempt at reclaiming the past,
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