This lecture is part of the 2022 Autumn Art Lecture series: 

Modernisms: Decolonising art's history

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About the Autumn Art Lectures

This year’s Autumn Art Lectures are back in person to challenge the concept of Modernism as a monolithic entity: Is there just one Modernism or are there many? What does it mean to think of Modernism on the global stage? Is there such a thing as an ‘alternative’ Modernism or is Modernism itself already inherently hybrid? As many institutions, from galleries and museums to universities, engage with the challenges of embracing global visual culture, this investigation is both vital and timely. Our inter-disciplinary speakers include academics, curators, artists and pedagogues who have grappled with the idea of the Modern, paying particular attention to blackness, Asian-ness, difference and decolonisation. The series aims to expose diversity at the heart of the Modern.

The Autumn Art Lecture series is hosted by the University of Bristol's Faculty of Arts with support from the Centre for Black Humanities and Bristol Ideas.

About this event

In 1877, in England, Walter Pater wrote in his essay ‘The School of Giorgione’ that a new age of art was dawning, one based on the model of music. His famous phrase was coined: ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. In the very same year, in America, the inventor Thomas Edison demonstrated a new device, the phonograph, that would change the ‘condition’ of music in ways unimaginable to Pater.

This talk addresses the new (modern) age, the condition of music, and the aspiration it supported to artistic abstraction. But what happens when we consider this, not through the example of European concert music (as is so often assumed), but through the musical form that grew up alongside Edison’s phonograph, African-American jazz? What does this alternative paradigm tell us about the ‘condition’ of modernist artistic production?

This lecture is presented with an introduction by Dr Peter Dent, Senior Lecturer, Head of the History of Art Department, University of Bristol, who will also moderate the Q&A with the audience.

About the speaker

Simon Shaw-Miller is Emeritus Chair of History of Art at the University of Bristol. He is also an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and of the Higher Education Academy. His research interests are interdisciplinary, focused on concepts of visual music, sound art, musical iconography, synaesthesia, musical ekphrasis, and the aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk. He has written on art and music from Richard Wagner to John Cage, from Samuel Palmer to Ralph Vaughan Williams, from Louis Armstrong to Marcel Duchamp and from Greek mythology to Walt Disney.

Tickets

Book your free ticket on Eventbrite: https://bit.ly/3gaz2X5 

Check out the other events in the Autumn Art Lecture series: https://bit.ly/3EFba8r