Griselda Pollock: ‘Gesture, Affect and the Post-Traumatic Image, or Raphael in Art and Art’s Histories after the Holocaust and in Contemporary Art’

Art & History of Art CLUB Talks
Department of Art, supported by the UoR Arts Committee

Griselda Pollock discusses her pre-recorded lecture entitled, Gesture, Affect and the Post-Traumatic Image, or Raphael in Art and Art’s Histories after the Holocaust and in Contemporary Art.

Griselda Pollock is Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art (1990- 2020) and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH) (2001-) at the University of Leeds. Griselda Pollock has taught for over 40 years in a School of Fine Art as a feminist, a social-historical  art historian and a cultural analyst. In this lecture she creates transdisciplinary encounters between art and history, feminist and trauma theory, making and thinking, and the innovative forms through which the aesthetic and ethical challenges of art in a post-traumatic condition can be explored.  Challenging the progressive logic of narrative, periodised art history, she presents and elaborates a new installation in her virtual feminist museum with film, literature and images that relay artists’ engagement with art and history through the relations of time, space and the archive in contemporary art making.

Griselda Pollock develops international, queer, postcolonial, feminist analyses of art’s diverse histories by formulating new concepts with which to deliver ‘feminist interventions in art’s histories’: Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology (1981 New edition Bloomsbury, 2020), Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity & the Histories of Art (1988), Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History (1992), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts (1992/96), Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (1999) Encounters in Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2007 and After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2013). Her most recent publications include the major monograph and first major art historical study of the artist, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory [Leben? oder Theater? 1941-43] (Yale, 2018) and writings on Yael Bartana, Laura Mulvey, Penny Siopis, Monica Weiss and Christine Taylor-Patten. Crossing art, museology, philosophy and film, she analyses the perennial threat of ‘the concentrationary universe’ created by the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century: Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman (eds), the Concentrationary Cinema (2009), Concentrationary Memories (2011) and Concentrationary Imaginaries (2015); Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (2019). Forthcoming are books on Memory and Place on the work of Van Gogh, The Agency of Marilyn Monroe and on abstract painting titled Killing Men and Dying Women: Painting and Imag(in)Difference in 1950s New York (Manchester University Press). More information available here:

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/fine-art/staff/410/prof-griselda-pollock
https://centrecath.leeds.ac.uk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griselda_Pollock

To attend, please contact Dr James Hellings (j.hellings@reading.ac.uk) for more details.