The Art of Relation
Date and time
Description
The Art of Relation- What relating to art can tell us about relating to others
A ‘Dialogue’ between Timothy Mathews and Barry Phipps
Cambridge Artworks invites you to The Art of Relation
6-7pm Thursday 3rd May 2018
FREE. Booking essential.
The talk will be followed by a private view of works by resident artists at Cambridge Artworks responding to The Art of Relation.
Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at University College London. His most recent book is Alberto Giacometti: the Art of Relation (I. B. Tauris 2013). He is a member of the Academy of Europe, and Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. In his writing and translating he explores what relating to art can tell us about relating to people, and he is now writing a book provisionally called Middlewords: Chronicles of Art and Loss.
Barry Phipps is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art. He specialises in Modern and contemporary British art, as well as having an interest in art across the Nordic countries. He was Interdisciplinary Fellow at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, where he conceived and organised a number of inter-disciplinary exhibitions. More recently, he has curated exhibitions and artists residence schemes across a range of galleries, museums and science institutes.
Alberto Giacometti: The Art of Relation
Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the 20th century. Sartre, Breton, and Winnicott are just some of the great thinkers who have drawn upon the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which has continued to resonate with artists, writers, and audiences. In this book, Timothy Mathews explores the themes of fragility, trauma, space, and relationality in Giacometti's art and the texts that respond or refer to them: the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom, and the theories of Bertolt Brecht, which recasts the iconic L'Homme qui marche as Walter Benjamin's Angel of History. During his lifelong quest to represent the human form, and to locate the humanity at the heart of conflicting conceptions of modernity, Giacometti returned to the key notions of depth and flatness, memory and attachment, through his sculptures and writings. Both a critical study of Giacometti's life and work, and an investigation of their affective power, this book asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about the history of our own time, and our ways of looking; about the nature of human attachment, and the humility of relating to art.
