Autumn Art Lectures Series 2009 - Feasts and Festivities
King Arthur's Feast from La Queste del Saint Graal.
Our theme for this autumn’s series goes back to an idea for a multi-disciplinary exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery featuring the production and consumption of food and drink, something to which all its sections could have contributed. The Art Lectures Committee saw the appropriateness of the ceremonial and festal elements of this concept to our purpose of celebrating the centenary of the University, and generously and enthusiastically put forward suggestions for an enormous range of topics and speakers: it has been exciting to compose a single series of six lectures out of such a multitude of possibilities.
As a sinologist, I wanted to include an expression of the centrality of the ritualised shared meal to Chinese society from the earliest times, the link between generations when the grandson impersonated his deceased grandfather, the link between coevals at the spring gatherings where marriages were made, the link between man and the universe at the Emperor's winter solstice sacrifice to Heaven. Our series will show some of the ways in which linkages of this sort bring people together to create and maintain great physical and social structures: megalithic monuments, drama and philosophy, a wealth of vessels sacred and profane. Such linkages are thus endowed with enormous power, power which may be seen by some as threatening and requiring curtailment, or seen by others as a magic instrument for the tightening of their stranglehold.
I hope our audiences will enjoy this feast of human creativity embodied in works of art and join us in wishing the University Ten Thousand Years.
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Tuesday 13th October* Dr Joshua Pollard, Reader in Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol |
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Tuesday 20th October Professor Brian A. Sparkes, Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Southampton |
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Tuesday 27th October Professor Dame Jessica Rawson, DBE, DLitt, FBA, Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Oxford University |
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Tuesday 3rd November* Professor Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, University of Bristol |
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Tuesday 10th November Dr Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Reader in French, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London |
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Tuesday 17th November Professor Ian Christie, School of History of Art, Birbeck College, University of London |
Organiser: Peter Hardie for the Art Lectures Committee
*Registration required - email Nicola.Fry@bristol.ac.uk
6pm in the Reception Room, Wills Memorial Building, Queens Road
ADMISSION FREE
Audio loop system
For further information about the University Art Lectures, Please contact Nicola Fry on tel. 0117 928 8515