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In our final Art History Research Seminar of term, we'll feature two talks from PhD students in the department

Talk 1: Transfiguring the Everyday: Daniel González and El Techo de la Ballena

Gabriel Gooch Blanco will present a chapter examines how the Venezuelan group El Techo de la Ballena's [The Roof of the Whale, 1961-1969] photobooks were used to develop their artistic practice and attempt to enact socio-economic and cultural change. The group emerged in Caracas the early 1960s following the 1958 coup d’état and fall of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1914-2001) dictatorship. They drew upon Surrealism, Dadaism and Informalism for their manifestoes, strategies, art and often direct criticism of the governing establishment. Their provocative artistic interventions were branded as 'art terrorism'.

Front cover. El Techo de la Ballena, Rayado Sobre el Techo 3 [Scratching on the Roof 3, 1964]. Photograph by Daniel González. The Martin Parr Collection, Tate Britain Archive and Special Collections, London.

Talk 2: Creating a Field of Play: Maps and Expansions in the work of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison

In this session, Harry Sailsbury will explore how eco-artists Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison pursued a variety of conceptual and aesthetic strategies to investigate and reimagine space, centring ecological and social wellbeing. The talk will consider how cartography and ideologies of capitalist and colonial expansion are dealt with, or absent from, the Harrisons’ artistic practice. Largely focusing on their Meditations series from the 1970s, and the Lagoon Cycle (1974-84), we will consider how the manipulation of maps, the use of aerial photography, and formal abstraction poses questions about our relationship to the land, and suggests strategies for directing practice and policy towards more ecological ends.

 Image caption: Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, maps from the version of Great Lakes Meditations, published as ‘Two Meditations, Two Commentaries & Eight Questions’, in New Wilderness Letter (Summer 1979), ed. Jerome Rothenberg

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