The concise dictionary of dress, an exhibition in the working stores of V&A

Located within the working store for the V&A’s vast reserve collections of furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, textiles, fashion and fine arts, The Concise Dictionary of Dress began with a journey through a turnstile, into an industrial goods lift and up to the first in a sequence of intriguing definitions in a walk-through dictionary of dress…
Cast objects and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories were arranged amongst the rolling racks and wrapped objects stored at Blythe House, the former headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Olympia, west London. The anatomy of the building revealed surreal and evocative interventions in unexpected places; metaphors of repression and ceremony; fragments of the clothed body briefly glimpsed.
Commissioned by Artangel, The Concise Dictionary of Dress re-described clothing in terms of anxiety, wish and desire, as a series of definitions created by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and accompanying installations designed and assembled by fashion curator Judith Clark.

The Concise Dictionary of Dress is also a 128-page hardback book. Illustrated in colour and with written contributions from Adam Phillips and Judith Clark and specially commissioned photography by Norbert Schoerner, it was published in April 2010 by Violette Editions in association with Artangel priced £25.00.

The second edition of the Artangel Podcast was released on 19 May 2010 and saw Artangel Co-Director Michael Morris take a walk through the V&A's vast, maze-like stores at Blythe House - in the company of the building's longstanding manager Glenn Benson. Click here to listen, download or subscribe.
retrieved from:
http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress/about_the_project/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress
on 30 September 2011

CFP: Wonderful things, Surrealism and Egypt

Call for Contributors:


Dada/Surrealism special journal issue:

"Wonderful Things" - Surrealism and Egypt

(http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/)


In November 1922 Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt's

Valley of the Kings, the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th

century. This discovery triggered an enormous Egyptomanic craze in Europe

and America, evident across architecture, the arts and popular culture. This

special issue of Dada/Surrealism (http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/) will mark

the 90th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by evaluating

Egypt’s significant and diverse impact on surrealism.



This influence can be traced throughout surrealism’s diverse artistic

productions and manifestations, as Martine Antle notes: “among all the

countries of the Middle East, Egypt remained the country of predilection for

surrealism throughout the vanguard period” (2006). Sphinxes, pyramids, eyes

of Horus and other Egyptian figures and symbols play significant roles in

the artworks and writings of Lee Miller, Man Ray, Georges Bataille, Robert

Desnos, Leonora Carrington, Roland Penrose, Jane Graverol, Joyce Mansour,

Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Gordon Onslow Ford. Desert landscapes

and hieroglyphic inscriptions are a recurrent theme in works by Leonor Fini,

Kay Sage, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, André

Breton, Victor Brauner and many other surrealists'works.



Egypt's significance for surrealism is also evident in Breton's display of

Egyptian ornaments on the famous mur of his studio. Surrealist reading

included books such as Antoine-Joseph Pernety's Les fables égyptiennes et

grecques (1758), Ludwig Achim von Arnim's Isabelle d’Égypte (1812), Émile

Soldi-Colbert de Beaulieu's La langue sacrée - La cosmoglypie (1902), and

Arthur Rimbaud's Lettres de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud: Égypte, Arabie, Éthiopie

(1899). Surrealists were highly interested in R. Falconnier's Egyptian tarot

and his writings on it. A recurring focus for surrealists and their

associates was the obelisk at the Place de la Concord. Described by Bataille

as "without a doubt the purest image of the head and the heavens", it was a

significant meeting place for Acéphale, and a repeated focus in Brassaï’s

photographs and Benjamin Péret’s writings. In turn, surrealism developed in

Egypt through the Egyptian Georges Henein, who joined the movement in 1936

and whose establishment of the movement Art et liberté in 1937, together

with Ramsès Younane, Fouad Kamel and Kamel el-Telmessany, marks the first

beginning of surrealism in Egypt. Art et liberté regarded surrealism as the

"means to create a new mythology reconciling reality and legend."



Egypt marks a nodal point for a range of surrealist investigations into

myth, colonial identity, cultural hybridity, and for the movement's

dialogues with science and pseudo-science including ethnography,

psychoanalysis, physics, cosmology, and natural history. Surrealist

adaptations, appropriations of and exchanges with Egypt and its signs,

symbols and philosophies open significant questions about surrealist

aesthetic representations and political critiques of the 'orient', the

'exotic', colonialism and ancient civilizations.



This special issue invites essays that explore the significance of the

multiple relations, points of contact, dialogues, engagements and exchanges

between surrealism and Egypt.



Please send a 250-word abstract, tentative title and brief CV to the guest

editors Patricia Allmer at p.allmer@mmu.ac.uk and Donna Roberts at

dmrobe@googlemail.com by October 16th, 2011. Completed essays will be due

February 13th 2011, and should be between 6000-8000 words. For queries

please contact Patricia Allmer and Donna Roberts at the email addresses

above. For further information on Dada/Surrealism please visit

http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/ (Contact: Patricia Allmer and Donna Roberts)

CFP: Museum Utopias: Navigating the Imaginary, Ideal and Possible Museum

A Two Day Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium at the School of

Museum Studies, University of Leicester Tuesday 27th and Wednesday

28th March 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leicester

In everyday life, the chance to dream, to imagine, to explore the idea

of the museum is limited, leaving many museums reacting to change,

rather than being able to think about how the museum could be. This

Symposium will give museum researchers, students and practitioners the

opportunity to consider the changes that are taking place in the world

and how museums might respond to them, using the idea of Utopia as a

place for dreaming as well as thinking practically about how these

challenges might be addressed.



Despite the impossibility of building Utopia, we arguably retain our

need for what Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett (2004) has called ‘the

utopian imagination’. Utopia can inspire us to challenge the status

quo, and to transform our world for the better. From temples of the

Muses dedicated to the arts to today’s democratic forums of debate and

consumption, the concept and the realization of the museum have

changed dramatically during its long and varied history. Stepping into

the Utopian otherworld enables us to engage the past and present

incarnations of the museum, both real and imagined, and begin to

navigate its future.



Papers are invited to address the following key themes, but we welcome

and encourage any creative or imaginative ideas that correspond with

the aims of the Symposium.



Please see the complete Call for Papers here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mutopia


Patrick Cox

Editor, H-MATERIAL CULTURE

http://camden-rutgers.academia.edu/PatrickCox

PhD Student

http://facultyexperts.blogs.rutgers.edu/

Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University

http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/

https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies