Working at White Cube: Graduate Hang Nguyen on her recent internship

Since graduating from the Department of Art History, Film and Visual Studies at The University of Birmingham, I thought life could only get easier with a degree under my belt. I started the summer as an optimistic graduate, thinking “Yeah, I’ve got this” for every job/internship/work experience placement that I applied for. This feeling of optimism lasted about two weeks. I made out over thirty applications but only heard back from one, at the White Cube Gallery.

I applied to the White Cube through their website, after visiting their Bermondsey gallery in the summer and having been impressed with what I saw. I sent a long cover letter detailing everything I knew about contemporary art, thanks, in no small part, to the BA I’d just finished at Birmingham, in the hope that my application would stand out. Luckily, it paid off!! I was invited to interview with the Head of Archives who decided that I was a good enough candidate to be her intern and assistant. Thus began my journey as an Archive Editorial Intern for White Cube Gallery.

On my first day at White Cube, I was given a tour of the gallery. The gallery is a refurbished 1970’s warehouse and the space is amazing. There are three major exhibition spaces as well as an archive space, private viewing rooms, office space, a warehouse, and auditorium and a bookshop. The warehouse is one of the best spaces: the gigantic space houses loads of works of art and I was lucky enough to see pieces by the likes of Marc Quinn, Eddie Peake and Jac Lierner, which were being photographed and stored.

In my role as Archive Editorial Intern, I was expected to manage the White Cube’s archive. The gallery holds a comprehensive archive with material dating from Jay Jopling’s first charity auction. Every single artist represented by White Cube has archive material, which ranges from press articles, letters and other ephemera (I found an artist’s paint palette during one of my trawls through the boxes). As an intern, I was expected to maintain this archive by requesting material from exhibitions that the artists in question were involved in, and organise them properly in hard and digital formats. This entailed corresponding with international and national galleries and museums to acquire this material.

A view of the archive room. The wall shows the sign from the first gallery space and all the invites for the exhibitions there which were self-portraits of the artists

In the second year of my BA degree I did a module called ‘Inside the Gallery’, and the module played a formative role in my decision to pursue a career in the professional art world. After curating a hypothetical exhibition and working on the interpretation material for the exhibition, which is the main output of the Inside the Gallery module, I decided that working in a gallery was exactly what I wanted to do. What’s more, the knowledge and experience I gained from the module was a considerable help during my internship, because I was already aware of the ways in which galleries operate, especially when it comes to marketing, publishing and the press. It also helped me during my exhibition material requests as I felt comfortable taking the responsibility of corresponding directly with other art institutions and understood my responsibility in maintaining the White Cube archive.

One of the projects I was given during my internship was to curate an exhibition on Tracey Emin, based on archival material that the White Cube possesses and features writings by Emin. This exhibition had to be visually powerful as well as representative of the White Cube’s holdings of Emin’s material. The focus was to be on Emin’s solo exhibitions and notable projects, such as her column for The Times Magazine and her contribution to the Olympics. The material I had at my disposal, the contents of the archive, includes hand-written letters to Jay Jopling as well as postcards sent by Emin from her holidays to the staff at the London gallery. There is, in short, a wealth of material in the archive, which is regularly used by the gallery as promotional objects or research material.

Image from a Tracey Emin event where she spoke about her inspiration for her exhibition

My internship lasted several exhibitions. The Gallery mounted shows on David Hammons, Tracey Emin, Etel Adnan and Liza Lou and Senga Nengudi, all of which I was able to contribute directly towards. Everything I did had a purpose for the archive. As an intern, I didn’t think I would get so much responsibility working in the gallery but I was responsible for the artists’ bibliographies and publications. The internship also allowed me to visit other galleries and join in with the events at White Cube, such as private views, talks and lectures. I had the privilege of attending a private view of Anselm Kiefer’s Royal Academy exhibition which was guided by Tim Marlow.

My experience at the Barber Institute, where I regularly volunteered during my degree and where the Art History department is based, the RBSA, where I worked during my degree, and the White Cube has demonstrated quite clearly that not every gallery works in the same way, and my combined experience has introduced me to a wealth of careers that are possible in the arts sector. The internship also allowed me to develop my understanding of contemporary art and its processes. I did work directly for artists studios, like Jake and Dinos Chapman and Mona Hatoum, which has given me a valuable insight into the way artists mediate between dealers and their consumers.

From my experience, I would definitely advise sending out loads of CVs because you never know what you might get. During my time at White Cube, I was also offered work experience with Christie’s House Sales department. A placement I applied for in August, I was offered a chance to work there in November for two weeks. Things like that can happen – you get nothing and then suddenly two things come at once! The past year after graduation has been incredibly valuable for my own personal development and I think I finally have an idea of what I actually want to do. My final piece of advice to all would-be graduates is not to worry about securing a job straight away, particularly in the arts sector, gaining the professional experience through voluntary or unpaid work is just as important as the knowledge gained from the degree…so I guess…just go for it!

Hang Nguyen

 

Funding for Work Experience 

The Department is pleased to announce the Matt Carey-Williams and Danny Roark Awards, a generous donation funded by one of our alumni that will allow undergraduate students to apply for bursaries of c. £300-500 to enable them to undertake internships, work experience and placements.

The University of Birmingham UK Professional Work Experience scheme also offers financial support for undergraduates (except final years) to undertake work experience in the UK in the summer vacation. Find out more here. The deadline for applications is 29 March. Last year, History of Art student Olivia Weightman received funding to undertake work experience at Christie’s. Read about her experience here.

The Association of Art Historians (AAH) also runs an Internship Award. There are two awards of up to £2,000 each towards placement-related expenses such as accommodation, travel and food. The Internship Award supports both full-time and part-time placements/ internships. The deadline is 1 April.

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Research Seminar Thursday 26th February: Imogen Wiltshire, ‘Occupational Therapy Courses at the New Bauhaus in Chicago (1942-1945) in Light of Actor-Network Theory’

DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY, FILM AND VISUAL STUDIES RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES 2014 – 15

Occupational Therapy Courses at the New Bauhaus in Chicago (1942-1945) in Light of

Actor-Network Theory

Imogen Wiltshire
(University of Birmingham) 

Thursday 26 February, 5.15 pm
Barber Institute Photograph Room

 

‘Blind men testing tactile charts and hand sculptures at the New Bauhaus’,
published in The Technology Review, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vol. XLVI No.1, November 1943

This paper examines the Occupational Therapy courses that László Moholy-Nagy developed at the New Bauhaus in Chicago during the Second World War through the lens of Actor-Network Theory. As is widely known, Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus, which later became the Institute of Design, in Chicago in 1937 after his emigration from Nazi Germany via London to the US. Less well known, however, and forming the focus of this paper is that in Chicago in 1942 he applied Bauhaus educational techniques, based on investigating materials and gaining tactile experience, for therapeutic purposes, especially for injured war veterans. The New Bauhaus’ Occupational Therapy training courses proposed, significantly, a new function for art within modernism and constitute important historical intersections between art practice and rehabilitation.
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a methodology developed by Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon, amongst others, which so far has had little attention in the Humanities. By challenging the notion of a fixed ‘social’ and the concept of ‘context’ (such as a preconceived social context) into which subjects of enquiry are located, this theory is arguably pertinent to art history, particularly in view of Latour’s suggested solution of instead tracing associations between human and non-human actors in a network. Accordingly, while this paper analyses the dissemination of Bauhaus pedagogic approaches for rehabilitative training in the 1940s, it also offers less concrete, more exploratory methodological suggestions about the possible relevance and uses of Actor-Network Theory.

All welcome!

Whodunit? The Fitzwilliam’s “New Michelangelos”. Continued.

JAMIE EDWARDS

Following my earlier post about the Bronze Panther Riders, sensationally revealed to the world as Michelangelos the other week by the Fitzwilliam Museum, the acclaimed Michelangelo scholar Prof. Frank Zöllner has waded into the debate and made his thoughts on the attribution known. Unfortunately for the Fitzwilliam (not to mention the owner of the bronzes, who must’ve been pretty chuffed with the Museum’s findings), Zöllner isn’t convinced.

Writing for Die Welt (available here, with a summary in English here), Zöllner raises a number of serious objections to the attribution, a number of which had already come up in my interview with David Hemsoll about the Panther Riders.

Like Hemsoll, Zöllner doubts whether Michelangelo could have gone off and turned these large and complicated bronzes out without leaving some indication of them behind in the contemporary documents. Vasari and Condivi acknowledge that Michelangelo designed bronzes, including the Julius statue for Bologna, but nowhere do either of them mention a pair of monumental panther riders. Nobody else from the 16th century mentions them either.

Zöllner also points out, as Hemsoll had, that the execution of the bronzes, if they are by Michelangelo, must have involved some sort of collaboration; it is simply impossible that Michelangelo will have produced them single-handedly, and in secret. We should want to know, then, about what that collaboration might have looked like and who it could have involved, in order to determine Michelangelo’s role in it.

Finally, Zöllner also criticised the weight given by the Fitzwilliam to the drawing in Montpellier, which forms the basis of their re-attribution of the bronzes to Michelangelo and is, according to them, exactly the same as the bronzes. However as Hemsoll had pointed out and now Zöllner as well, the drawing in Montpellier is not identical with the sculptures. They in fact differ in a number of important respects, including the relative proportions of the panthers and their riders and the twisted position of the riders’ bodies. There’s also the problem that the drawing is thought to be a copy of a Michelangelo drawing, but can we say for sure that it is?

Maybe Michelangelo, Panther riders, 16th century, bronze, private collection (on display at the Fitzwilliam Collection)

Zöllner signed off by criticising both the British press and the Fitzwilliam’s experts for the way in which the proposed attribution was reported, as though it was a done deal and that they had, indeed, “discovered new Michelangelos”. In reality, it seems as though we have a far way to go before we can claim, with any certainty, that the Panther Riders really are by Michelangelo.

View Festival of Art History, Institut français, London

Exciting news! Following on from a successful first year, View Festival of Art History is back in 2015 with a fantastic programme of events from 27th February – 1st March!

View is an incredibly student-friendly festival, with many free events on offer, and £5 student tickets are available for several talks and tours across London venues. The festival has been organised by the Institut Français, where many of the events are taking place, including a presentation by University of Birmingham postgraduate Lauren Dudley who won first prize in the Student Papers competition! Lauren will be giving her paper, ‘Sublime Ruins’, which looks at Hubert Robert, La démolition de l’église Saint-Jean-en-Grève, c.1797–1800 (France) and John Piper, Coventry Cathedral, 15 November, 1940, 1940 (UK), on Saturday 28 February.

The festival presents an exciting opportunity for anyone interested not only in art history, but conservation, heritage, languages and the makings of civilisation and culture as a whole.

Look out for an article from our View student representative Emily Robins, second-year History of Art student, who will be reporting back about the festival, or why not check it out yourself?

Details about the festival and its programme are available here:

http://viewfestival.co.uk/ – hope to see you there!

Whodunit? Jamie Edwards talks to David Hemsoll about the Fitzwilliam’s “new Michelangelos”.

JAMIE EDWARDS

Maybe Michelangelo, Panther riders, 16th century, bronze, private collection (on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Last week, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge revealed to the world that they have “discovered” not one but two statues that they believe can be attributed, fairly confidently, to Michelangelo (1475 – 1564). Each of the sculptures, which are made of bronze and are roughly a meter tall, shows a naked, muscular man riding triumphantly on the back of a ferocious-looking panther. And, if the Fitzwilliam’s findings are correct, it makes the Panther Riders the only works in bronze by Michelangelo to have survived; a medium in which he is known to have worked—or intended to work—on at least three separate occasions.

The Riders have, to be sure, been associated with Michelangelo before. In the 19^th century, when the Riders were in the collection of Adolphe de Rothschild (from where they get their alternative name “The Rothschild Bronzes”) they were considered authentic Michelangelos (on what basis, I wonder?). However, when Rotschild’s bronzes were exhibited in Paris in 1878, several connoisseurs voiced their doubts about the attribution, and over the course of the subsequent 130-or-so years the association of the bronzes to Michelangelo has been pretty well put to bed. Since then the bronzes have been given to a whole bunch of other artists, including Willem Danielsz Van Tetrode (1505 – 87), and, according to Sotheby’s in 2002, the circle of Michelangelo’s Florentine contemporary Benvenuto Cellini (1500 – 71).

Sheet of studies with the Virgin embracing the Infant Jesus (c.1508), unknown draughtsman after Michelangelo Buonarroti. Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Now experts brought together by the Fitzwilliam reckon they have gathered ‘compelling evidence’ in favour of attributing the Panther Riders firmly to Michelangelo once and for all, thus resolving an artistic whodunit that has limped on for over a century. The tide began to turn in favour of Michelangelo’s authorship in 2002, when Prof. Paul Joannides, who has played an instrumental role in the latest re-attribution of the bronzes to Michelangelo, got the chance to study the Riders for the first time at Sotheby’s. Exactly what Joannides made of them in 2002 is hard to say, but, perhaps tellingly, the statues were labeled as “circle of Michelangelo” when they were shown in the Royal Academy’s bronze exhibition in 2012. What is clear is that the bronzes grabbed Joannides’s attention, and last autumn he made a discovery that galvanised serious interest in the status of the bronze Riders. In Montpellier’s Musée Fabre there is a sheet of studies, the largest of which is a Virgin embracing the Christ Child, which is thought to be a copy of drawings made by Michelangelo done by one of his pupils at some point in the first decade of the 1500s, more precisely, at about 1508. And the Montpellier sheet of studies is important because there is, in the lower right corner, a study for a nude riding on the back of a panther, which is to say, precisely the same subject that we encounter in the Rothschild bronzes.

If the Montpellier sheet of studies really does preserve now-lost designs by Michelangelo then we can say, on the basis of this evidence, that the subject matter, at least, of the bronze Panther Riders can be traced back to Michelangelo. The Fitzwilliam have done exactly this, with Victoria Avery going one step further, declaring in a video for the BBC (below) that the Montpellier drawing shows the composition of the Rotschild bronzes ‘precisely’. And taking this as their point of departure, the Fitzwilliam has subsequently gathered a range of experts—from Joannides to Prof. Peter Abrahams, a clinical anatomist—, who have compiled a dossier of evidence to show that the Panther Riders really are the only surviving bronzes by Michelangelo.

With this in mind, I met with my supervisor David Hemsoll, whose interests lie in 15^th– and 16^th-century Italian art and architecture and who has published on Michelangelo, to get his thoughts on the Fitzwilliam’s findings, and to consider their evidence. Here’s our conversation:

 

First question, had you ever come across these statues before?

No [laughs].

I ask because this isn’t, or so I read, the first time that the Panther Riders have been associated with Michelangelo. Apparently they were thought to be by Michelangelo in the 19^th century, but were then removed from his oeuvre in the 20^th, and they’ve since been attributed to a number of other sculptors, including Cellini. So you’ve never encountered them?

No . . . Well, there are a lot of things that are associated with Michelangelo. That’s the trouble. I haven’t come across these in the sense that I felt I should be paying them much attention . . . So, [laughing] I guess, I don’t know if I’ve come across them.

No well I think that most people had shelved them. But the first bit of new evidence there is and that has led to the latest re-attribution to Michelangelo is this drawing in Montpellier, which, they say, is a faithful copy of lost Michelangelo drawings done by a student of his. And one of them shows a nude riding a panther. By drawing a comparison between the sculptures and the drawing on that sheet in Montpellier, they say there’s conclusive evidence to establish a link between the bronzes and Michelangelo. What do you make of that comparison? Because Avery says they’re exactly the same but they’re not, are they?

Well, no. The drawing isn’t exactly the same as the sculptures. But we’ll come back to that in a bit.

The thing is the usual way people have made clamorous attributions in the past—and those include the Crucifixion in Sta. Spirito, Florence, the two panel paintings [the Entombment and the “Manchester Madonna“] in the National Gallery, the Cupid in New York, as well as the recently-acquired Torment of St. Anthony by the Kimbell Museum in Texas—well, the usual way of determining an attribution, is that you see something in the primary sources, the biographies of Vasari and Condivi, and you produce something which seems to match them, and then you build your case on the basis of that. Some people will then either agree or they’ll disagree about the similarities. Now, so what you’re doing here is that you are immediately highlighting the first problem with all this, and that is that these works [the Panther Riders] are not mentioned in any primary source. And this is quite surprising, given their size, their quality of execution, and their striking and unusual subject matter. So the problem is that you would have expected works like this produced by Michelangelo to have been recorded or mentioned, however inaccurately, in the literature. So that, that’s the problem. So you’re right that the drawing produced provides some basis for a proposed attribution . . . Are you going to ask me about the other factors . . . ?

Michelangelo, Torment of St Anthony, c.1487, tempera and oil on panel, Kimbell Art Museum, Texas

Yes, I’m going to ask you about the other evidence.

Well perhaps we want to treat them all together. There is a drawing. And that could be said to support this attribution.

Well, on the basis of that, because it’s the drawing that got them going with this, the Fitzwilliam wheeled in a clinical anatomist, who said, and this is a quote apparently, that the anatomy is “textbook Michelangelo” so, you know, the abdomens and the bellybuttons and all the rest of it. The anatomist concluded that the artist responsible for these sculptures obviously had a command of human anatomy–he even found a tendon in the arch of a foot. So this is grist to their mill, that an anatomist is impressed with the bodies of the panther riders, since everybody knows that Michelangelo was all about human anatomy, and that he dissected cadavers etc. And then there’s the other bit of evidence. They’ve done some science and x-rayed the statues and found that the cast is thick and heavy, which is a telltale sign, they say, of 15^th– or 16^th-century manufacture.

Yes, well, that’s their evidence. And, as evidence, it looks, well I wouldn’t quite say convincing . . . but it’s quite powerful.

Yes, they obviously think so. Those are their three bits of evidence.

Yes, that’s it. Those are the three bits of evidence. And taken together it’s quite a powerful case although you could point to slight problems with all those pieces of evidence. As far as the drawing’s concerned, it’s by a follower of Michelangelo and not by Michelangelo, and it doesn’t show the same composition as the bronzes, insofar as the nude figure on the back of the panther is much smaller in the drawing than it is in the sculptures. Then the business about the anatomy, well that does seem to suggest that the sculptures have got something to do with Michelangelo. The other way to think about this is to compare the sculptures to other known works by Michelangelo from this period, especially the David and especially the Dying Slave, in the Louvre, and there are some apparent similarities which are quite great. Then the question about the bronze casting, well that’s very interesting and the Fitzwilliam have got great expertise on this, so their conclusions that the bronze casting, and the thickness of the bronze, point to a date of around the early 1500s, is, again, powerful evidence. So I agree that the case is, in some respects, powerful . . .

Michelangelo, Dying slave, c.1513, marble, Louvre, Paris

So they’ve made a fair case.

Yes, well, it’s quite powerful in some respects, and less powerful in others.

Such as?

Well some people could have said, and maybe they have but I haven’t noticed, that the subject matter is comparable to sculptural ideas from the late 15^th century and into the 16^th, in particular the idea of the suggestive naked body of a man. That’s an idea that was almost an obsession of Michelangelo’s tutor, his de facto tutor in sculptor, Bertoldo di Giovanni, who produced all sorts of sculptures of this kind. And one particular point of similarity is that the possible Michelangelos show one figure who is clean-shaven, and one who is bearded, and there’s a pair of sculptures by Bertoldo, which make up a kind of pair, which have again one figure that is clean-shaven and one figure that wears a beard. All this could be put into an argument that would link the bronzes to Michelangelo.

The problem, the main problem, as I see it, is the fact that they’re made of bronze and they’re very big. The difficulty is that it might be conceivable that Michelangelo could, almost secretly or in an unnoticed way, make a pair of sculptures out of bronze by doing it in his back garden or kitchen, with nobody else noticing that it was going on, and then perhaps giving it away to someone, but the trouble is that works made out of bronze imply a collaboration with somebody. And once that idea is brought out into the open, the nature of the collaboration needs to be qualified and Michelangelo’s role in it would then have to be established. What we might be saying is that Michelangelo did some studies for a sculpture that was then made in bronze by somebody else. Or Michelangelo produced full-scale models, which were then cast in bronze by somebody else. Or Michelangelo just told a few people that you could make sculptures in such a way, and gave them some pointers, and they were duly cast in bronze by another person. What’s absolutely impossible is that Michelangelo would have, as it were, gone away by himself and made these large bronze sculptures, all by himself, without any assistance—that’s just not possible. So if we are going to believe that they’re by Michelangelo then we have to understand better the circumstances of their making, and we need to have a better understanding of a possible context for the making of bronze figures of such scale, because they are a meter tall in height, in order to really substantiate the kind of claim that is being made, which has to have been in the form of some sort of collaboration. So that’s the difficulty I have.

So it’s impossible? To suppose that Michelangelo just knocked them up, by himself, in his kitchen or wherever? Is that just not how it was done?

No. You need a workshop of people to make these things. And they’re very difficult to produce alone.

Is that what will have happened with, say, the over life-size Julius II sculpture, which, as Vasari and Condivi say, was made in bronze by Michelangelo and put up in Bologna in 1506?

Yeah. The Julius sculpture presumably was made by people who were good at casting in bronze, and they worked in collaboration with Michelangelo who helped them produce a sculpture, or model, which then could have been cast in bronze. I mean he could have done a lot of work on it but what he didn’t do was create the molds and everything, and pour the molten bronze into the molds, and then take the bronze out of the molds and then do all the immensely laborious finishing off on the sculpture. So that has to have been a collaboration. And other, early works, done in bronze by Michelangelo—there’s a documented bronze David, again described by Vasari—must likewise have involved some sort of collaboration. So if we were able to understand better how these collaborations came about then we would be in a better position to understand possible circumstances that would support the attribution of the Panther Riders to Michelangelo. So that’s the problem I have . . .

Well, that seems to be a reasonable concern.

What is clear is that it’s untrue to say that Michelangelo was entirely restricted to sculpting in marble because there are quite a lot of things, or references in the early sources, to Michelangelo’s involvement in the design, or the making of, sculptures in bronze. The statue of Julius II, for the city of Bologna, is a conspicuous example because it must have been very big, but he did also intend, for example, to make bronze reliefs for the Julius tomb. And he wouldn’t have been making all those things by himself.

In short then, at this stage the attribution seems plausible but there are unanswered questions. Perhaps answers to those questions will be forthcoming when the Fitzwilliam hosts its international conference on Monday 6 July 2015, when they will present the full findings. In the meantime, the Panther Riders, which are privately owned, are on public display at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 9 August 2015.