ISSUE 3 Spring/Summer 2018
The following papers are based on presentations made at the conference held at the Royal Academy in London on 3-4 November 2017 in conjunction with the exhibition Dalí-Duchamp that was co-produced by the Royal Academy and The Dalí Museum. The exhibition and its catalogue intended to foment new thinking about both artists and spark debate about their respective, and apparently contrasting, positions in relation to modern art. At the same time, they were never intended to be the last word on the subject, and of course exhibitions and their related publications have their limits, making it impossible to represent the full range of the growing interest in the two artists. By considering these major figures in terms of their proximity rather than as isolated monographic figures, it is possible to shed new light on their respective bodies of work. It is hoped the following papers will initiate the process of reassessing their work and continue to generate more research.
Dawn Ades and William Jeffett
Deborah Bürgel
Dr. Deborah Bürgel is an Assistant Curator at Staatliche Schlösser, Gärten und Kunstsammlungen Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. She completed her studies of art history, philosophy and German studies in 2015 with a doctorate on fictional artists and Marcel Duchamp’s creation Rrose Sélavy at the University of Cologne. Since August 2016 she has been undertaking a traineeship at the Duchamp Research Center and the Cabinet of Prints and Drawings of the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Staatliche Schlösser, Gärten und Kunstsammlungen Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. She has published essays on the art of the 20th Century as well as on contemporary artists, curated exhibitions of contemporary art and gives lectures on art history. Her specialism is the art of the 20th Century and her research interests concern the invention of fictitious artists and vitality in art.
Irene Civil
Irene Civil has been the Head of the Conservation Department of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí since 2001. Educated in Art History at the University of Barcelona, she has a MA in Art Conservation from the Queen’s University (ON, Canada). She has wide-ranging professional experience as a conservator of modern and contemporary artworks and paintings for different museums and institutions in Spain. She has experience in active museum exhibition and loan programmes, such as Antoni Tàpies Foundation and Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona. In her position of Head of Conservation at the Dalí Foundation, she has directed interdisciplinary projects of preventive conservation and restoration. She also conducts long-term research projects on Dalí’s technique, based on technical studies of paintings. She is involved in the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, the final chapter of which was launched last December 2017. She has also participated in international symposiums on art conservation and has published some articles on the artists’ materials, studio practice and artistic intention.
Barnaby Dicker
Dr. Barnaby Dicker is a researcher, lecturer, artist-filmmaker and curator. His research revolves around conceptual and material innovations in and through graphic technologies and arts, including cinematography and photography, with particular emphasis on avant-guard practices. He sits on the editorial board of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and was a member of the recent UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded International Research Network ‘Film and the Other Arts: Intermediality, Medium Specificity, Creativity’ (2015-17). He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London and is involved in the ‘Reset the Apparatus!’ project at Universität für angewandte Kunst, Wien. His essay on “Stroboscopic Revelations in Blade Runner” appears in PhotoResearcher No. 29 (2018). Forthcoming publications include: “21st Century Flicker: Jodie Mack, Benedict Drew and Sebastian Buerkner” in Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn (eds.), Experimental and Expanded Animation: Current Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan 2018); “Pierre Mac Orlan’s ‘Social Fantastic’ and Disney Animation” in Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant (eds.), Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge 2018); and, as editor, a special issue of Art in Translation dedicated to Michel Eugène Chevreul, Charles Henry and Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic Theories of Abstraction.
Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp: “Reversing the laws of cinematography”…frame-by-frame.
Miguel Escribano
Dr. Miguel Escribano’s wayward existence as an itinerant artist and sometime scholar began in the UK in 1966. After completing a degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Newcastle, Miguel lived a lazy life on a roof in Sevilla for 8 years, painting and exhibiting, and very occasionally working. This was followed by 8 years in London, working front of house at the Royal Academy, Tate, Hayward and National Gallery, while taking an MA and PhD at the University of Essex, with theses titled The Visible Man/The Invisible Woman: the absence of Salvador Dalí’s mother, and Dalí’s Religious Models: the Iconography of Martyrdom and its Contemplation supervised by Professor Dawn Adès. Miguel now lives in Tyresö, Sweden, with his partner, the author Joséfin Roos and their two children Clara and Jonathan. He runs the Konstverket Arts Centre and is chairman of the local Arts Society, and is leading a project to convert a disused power station into an arts centre. He still doesn’t find much time to paint.
Dalí and Duchamp: Self-Reflection and the Mother’s Body
Haim Finkelstein
Professor (Emeritus) and founder of the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, Haim Finkelstein curated dozens of exhibitions at the Avraham Baron Gallery at Ben-Gurion University and at other galleries in Israel. He published extensively on modern art, Israeli and Jewish art, and Surrealism. He curated a major exhibition of E. M. Lilien’s prints and photographs and published extensively on his art. His publications include Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object (1979); Salvador Dalí’s Art and Writing 1927-1940: The Metamorphoses of Narcissus (1996); The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (edited and translated with commentaries and annotations, 1998); The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought (2007). A second edition of The Collected Writings was published in 2017 by The Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida. Also published in 2017 is his translation of Dalí’s writings into Hebrew. He’s currently working on a history of Surrealism.
Duchamp and Dalí: Photography of the Naked Object
Paul B. Franklin
Paul B. Franklin obtained his doctorate in art history from Harvard University. Based in Paris, he is an independent scholar and specialist on Marcel Duchamp. From 2000 to 2016, he was the editor in chief of the scholarly journal Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, one of the most highly regarded publications devoted to the artist and his work. He also worked with Duchamp’s heirs for many years managing the artist’s estate. Paul B. Franklin has lectured and published widely on Duchamp. Some of his most recent publications include “Marcel Duchamp, ses maîtres et ses pirouettes autour de la peinture,” which was the lead essay in the catalogue of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: la peinture, même organized in 2014 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the book The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare, a bilingual edition of the correspondence of Duchamp and Robert Lebel, which the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles published in 2016; and the essay “‘Can one make works that are not works ‘of art’?”: Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack” for the catalogue of the 2016 exhibition focusing on this readymade at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris.
Décor in Dialogue: Marcel Duchamp’s and Salvador Dalí’s Projects for the Galerie Gradiva
Margaret Iversen
Margaret Iversen is Professor Emerita at the University of Essex, England. Her books include Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (1993), Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (2009), and Photography, Trace, and Trauma (2017). She edited, with Diarmuid Costello, a special issue on “Photography after Conceptual Art” for Art History and another on “Agency and Automatism: Photography and Art since the Sixties” for Critical Inquiry. She also edited the Whitechapel Gallery’s “Documents of Contemporary Art” volume on Chance (2010). Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (2010) was written in collaboration with Stephen Melville.
Index and Icon in the Work of Duchamp and Dalí
Elliott King
Dr. Elliott King is an Associate Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University and a specialist in Dalí’s post-war art and writing. Educated at the University of Essex and the Courtauld Institute of Art, his publications include Dalí, Surrealism, and Cinema (Kamera Books, 2007), Dalí: The Late Work (High Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2010), and contributions to Dalí exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Tate Modern, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2010 he curated Dalí: The Late Work at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Dr. King lives in Lexington, Virginia with his wife and ‘Dioscurique’ twin daughters.
Francesco Miróglio
Francesco Miróglio is an independent researcher. In 2012 he earned a Master degree in Art history and cultural heritage from the University of Genoa (Italy), and in 2015 a Postgraduate degree in Art History. Both his dissertations were focused on the French artist Marcel Duchamp. In 2015 he won the fourth scholarship of the Duchamp-Forschungszentrum of Schwerin. The research project analyses the relationship between the Duchamp’s masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even and Raymond Roussel’s play Impressions d’Afrique. The outcome of this research is the forthcoming monograph Roussels bizarre Welten und Duchamps Großes Glas / The bizarre world of Raymond Roussel and Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. The impact of the play Impressions d’Afrique on The Bride stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even, to be published by the Staatliches Museum Schwerin/Ludwigslust/Güstrow press in the series Lecture Notes.
Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí: the eroticism between sculptures and ready-made
Pilar Parcerisas
Pilar Parcerisas is an art critic, essayist and exhibition curator with a Ph. D. in Art History and M.A. in Communication. She has been curator of the following exhibitions, among others: Ideas and Attitudes. Around Conceptual Art in Catalonia, 1964-1980… (1992), Joséph Beuys. Manresa Hbf (1994), Agnus Dei. Romanesque art and 20th Century Artists (1996), Dalí. Elective Affinities (2004), Man Ray. Lights and Dreams (2006), Viena Actionism (2008), Illuminations. Visionary Catalonia (2009), Joséph Beuys. Diary of Seychelles (2009), Dalí, Duchamp and Man Ray. A chess game (2014-2016), Joan Ponç. Diabolo (2017) Adolf Loos. Private spaces (2017-2018). She has published a selection of her articles in the book Art & Co (2003), Barcelona Art-Zona (2007) and the books Conceptualismo(s). El arte conceptual en España, 1964-1980 (2007) and Duchamp in Spain (2009). She is an art critic at the newspaper Elpuntavui in Barcelona, and has been director for the Contemporary Art Documentation Centre “Alexandre Cirici” in Barcelona. She has written screenplays for cinema. Vicepresident of the National Council for the Arts and Culture (2009-2012) and member of the Plenary of this organism until now.
Dalí and Duchamp in the face of the History of Western Art
Megakles Rogakos
Megakles Rogakos is an art historian and exhibition curator. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from The American College of Greece (1997); a Master’s degree in Arts, Policy & Management from the City University, London (1998); another Master’s degree in Art History & Theory from Goldsmiths College, London (1999); and a PhD in Philosophy & Art History from the University of Essex (2016). In 2000-2004 he worked as an information officer at the Tate Gallery, conducted scholarly research and curated a series of multimedia exhibitions, in London and abroad, featuring international contemporary artists. In 2004-2012 he held an appointment as ACG Art Curator at the American College of Greece. In that capacity, he organized the art collection into what became known as “ACG Art”; he created the www.acgart.gr web site for the collection; he increased the collection from 865 to 3,427 works; he initiated the ACG Art Gallery that opened in 2008; he curated 12 ACG Art exhibitions; and he collaborated with the college departments for developing and implementing educational programs. Since 2012, he has worked as an independent curator, continuing to curate exhibitions and supervise cultural projects, while pursuing his PhD research in art history at the University of Essex. The majority of the aforementioned exhibitions are accompanied by a catalogue, for which he has contributed texts in Greek and English, and of which he supervises the design. He also publishes reviews of exceptional art exhibitions on the website of www.elculture.gr.
Dalí and Duchamp’s mutual interest in Homer: Appropriating the Appropriator
Carme Ruiz
Since 2017, Carme Ruiz González has been the Senior Curator of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí (FGSD). She is the former Coordinator of the Centre for Dalínian Studies of the FGSD in Figueres. Her relationship with the FGSD began in 1993 when the artist’s legacy was still waiting to be inventoried and catalogued. The first major task was to approach and study the inherited documents and organize them according to archival and librarian criteria. Related to exhibitions, she has acted as assistant curator to the Dalí’s Museums Director. One of the most relevant projects she coordinated is the Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Salvador Dalí, 1910-1983: https://www.salvador-dali.org/en/artwork/catalogue-raisonne/ Besides the daily tasks of coordinating the department, she has participated in symposiums, written texts for catalogues and studied in depth the work of the Empordà genius.
The Largest Surrealist Object in the World
David Stent
Dr. David Stent is an artist, writer, curator and performer whose recent work is concerned with the role of writing in art practice, particularly in association with artists’ publications and the use of theory and philosophy in contemporary art. He holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Reading and is currently Subject Leader in Visual Arts and Chair of the Research Committee at West Dean College, part of the Edward James Foundation. The unique resource of the Edward James Archive is informing a variety of ongoing projects, including extended research on James’ literary output, both published and unpublished.
Dalí / Duchamp in light of Edward James ¬– The International Surrealist Exhibition 1936
ISSN 2471-4976, Avant-garde Studies, Published by The Dalí Museum, One Dalí Boulevard, St. Petersburg, FL 33701. Content, Layout, graphics copy @The Dalí Museum 2016-2018, All Rights Reserved