Chris Dorsett

University of Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, Research Associate

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Chris Dorsett trained at the Royal College of Art in the early 1970s and, a decade later, established a creative interface between his field of expertise, the contemporary arts, and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The exhibitions he organised with Helene La Rue, the Museum’s ethnomusicologist, generated unexpected and alternative interpretations of this famous collection. Dorsett went on to curate similar museum projects in Sweden and Finland, after which he applied his highly experimental method of exhibition-making to a Hong Kong heritage site (the walled village of Kat Hing Wai) and an Amazonian field station (part of his 2002-2004 Trees Walking project at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). While he was a professor of fine art at Northumbria University, Dorsett wrote many essays for publications about museums. He recently returned to the Pitt Rivers Museum where his personal archive has been accessioned and is currently being catalogued.

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Papers by Chris Dorsett

Paper, Wall, Table and After" , Northumbria University, Gallery North: curators Sian Bowen and Chris DorsettPart 1 Paper, Table, Wall and After1st December 2014 - 23rd January 2015 Northumbria University Gallery NorthPart 2 Paper, Table, Wall and After and RE:fold30 November – 6 December 2015Inte...

At a moment’s notice: according to the pleasure of the holder: the semiotics of paper

Keynote conference paper. DeSForM 2013, School of Digital Media, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China

Paper, table, wall & after

I was exhibition co-curator and lead artist. The external partner was Taiwan National University ... more I was exhibition co-curator and lead artist. The external partner was Taiwan National University of Arts, Taipei. This exhibition was jointly organised with artist Sian Bowen and featured the work of 38 artists who contribute to the research and teaching activities of Paper Studio Northumbria. An earlier version was held in Northumbria University's Gallery North (December 2014 - January 2015).

Trees walking

Thoughts for a journey: a prepared text with passing discussions

This curated event was realised as a scripted train journey from Glasgow Central Station to Glasg... more This curated event was realised as a scripted train journey from Glasgow Central Station to Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, Nitshill. The context was Doubtful Occasion: a creative symposium based on artist Christine Borland’s research into WW1 objects in Glasgow Museums’ collection, Thursday, 5 October 2017. The symposium included my related paper: ‘the train starts – it stops – it starts again (effort, stasis, and the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre)’.

Revisiting Tantra: a contemporary British and Indian response to the “seductiveness” of Tantric museum objects

On a daily basis the communicative presence of the human body in contemporary Indian visual cultu... more On a daily basis the communicative presence of the human body in contemporary Indian visual culture is understood and utilised without the support of textual commentary or explanation. For example, the movements and gestures of Kathakali and Bharatanatyam dance have embodied semiotic significance for their audiences whether the viewing context is classical theatre, where meanings are historically codified, or a Bollywood film, in which traditional content is emptied out to generate greater immediacy and appeal. In this paper a British artist versed in Peircian semiotics (Dorsett) collaborates with a traditional Kathakali dancer from Kerala (Nair) to examine the role of attraction and appeal within the non-verbal repertoires of Indian dance movement, an undertaking that follows well-established thinking in performance theory (e.g. Turner 1986). However, the aim is not to add to this specific theoretical canon but to reappraise the 1960s/70s museological and exhibitionary frame in whi...

Audience-free practices and the art school panopticon

Remembering what art schools were like in the 1960s and 1970s is like opening a storage box put a... more Remembering what art schools were like in the 1960s and 1970s is like opening a storage box put away when Rosalind Krauss’ Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1978), or some similarly radical essay, turned up in the college library. About thirty years ago there was a moment when the studios in which art students worked were no longer, conceptually speaking, instructional environments in any sense comparable to that of a life room. From that moment an art school was entirely a site of avant-garde endeavour in which the staff shaped and promoted, with increasing ambition, new generations of artists. With or without Krauss, fine art teaching embraced a vastly extended range of practices and a greater diversity of location, both in relation to the possible sites of production and the different forms of reception. Similarly, the mental space in which students responded to pedagogic developments took on an external alignment. There was an increased awareness of audience reception: a studio w...

Studio Ruins: describing 'unfinishedness

With creative practices things go wrong, work is ruined, and projects remain unfinished. Paradoxi... more With creative practices things go wrong, work is ruined, and projects remain unfinished. Paradoxically, since failure is a matter of enhanced appreciation in the arts (e.g. Samuel Beckett’s ‘fail better’), neither ‘wrongness’, ‘ruination’ nor ‘unfinishedness’ means what it says. Building on the topographical encounters of fine art studio teaching, this article explores the intersection of ruined work, incomplete creativity and disarticulating sensations. While Jason Rhoades’ messy installation art in a public gallery can evoke (like a 2005 account of abandoned factories by Tim Edensor) a problematic romanticization of unfinished and ruined work, I argue that other less recognized forces are in play. In the privacy of art school studios, monitoring ‘health and safety’ procedures challenges all evocations of aesthetic spectacle and poetic vision. This amounts to an alternative topology of ruination that relates to Caitlin DeSilvey’s 2006 descriptions of agricultural decay. Because a c...

Ruptures and Wrong-Footings: Destabilizing Disciplinary Cultures

Leonardo

In this transcribed conversation, three artists from the U.K. research group The Cultural Negotia... more In this transcribed conversation, three artists from the U.K. research group The Cultural Negotiation of Science (CNoS) share the generational perspectives they bring to the contested field of arts-science research. Traversing territories between art-practice, physics, genetics and critical theory, their practice-based strategies actively destabilize the binary nature of cross-disciplinary dialogue in productive ways, allowing the spaces between artistic and scientific modes of inquiry to become sites of learning, both within and beyond academic institutions.

Creativity: can artistic perspectives contribute to management questions?

… at the 9th EIASM Workshop on …, 2002

Today creativity is considered as a necessity in all aspects of management. This working paper mi... more Today creativity is considered as a necessity in all aspects of management. This working paper mirrors the artistic and managerial conceptions of creativity. Although there are shared points in both applications, however deep-seated and radically opposed traits account for the divergence between the two fields. This exploratory analysis opens up new research questions and insights into practices.

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Negotiating the Icebox: cold collections, dark museums and contemporary art

Conference paper. 'Art Out of Time', Institute of Visual Research, University of Oxford. ... more Conference paper. 'Art Out of Time', Institute of Visual Research, University of Oxford. The exhibition Raid the Icebox (1969) was a pioneering engagement with institutional collection-holding in which Andy Warhol negotiated the conflicting practices and sensibilities that still impact on artists working at the interface of contemporary art and traditional museum display. Framed by the trope of liberating frozen material from the museum store, Warhol’s ‘icebox raid’ now stands as a seminal example of historic art objects serving as installation material in a contemporary art exhibition. In an academic world dominated by theories of embodied meaning and environmental crisis, the significance of Warhol’s title is surely on-going. The aim was to bring stored artworks into the light of day and, within Warhol’s conceit of liberation, the notion of refrigeration operates alongside the metaphor of darkness as a key representation of the non-compliant and non-contemporaneous charact...

On waking up, say a spell backwards

The exhibition Thinking Tantra is unavoidably tied to a long dormancy. For many art school people... more The exhibition Thinking Tantra is unavoidably tied to a long dormancy. For many art school people the term Tantric art seems to have been asleep throughout the development of Contemporary Art. Or perhaps it is the other way around. With Rebecca Heald’s curatorial project at Drawing Room, some kind of art school awakening seems possible. In the exhibition catalogue, Virginia Whiles suggests that Tantra offers opportunities for a 'rebellious search'. Rebellion interests art students and I am now wondering how much Philip Rawson had art school rebels in mind as he wrote his book Drawing (1969) and then began work on his Hayward Gallery exhibition Tantra (1971). Rawson aligned being at art school with the state of being awake to Tantra’s possibilities. Perhaps he thought that students would be particularly receptive to the idea that Tantric diagrams were not diagrammatic for Tantric practitioners. Both the Drawing book and the Tantra catalogue treat imagery not as an abstracted ...

Waving and Drowning: at the conjunction of contemporary British and Indian responses to a song by Rabindranath Tagore

This text is the final version of a paper given at Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the ... more This text is the final version of a paper given at Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the Jātaka Tales and Buddhism in India Today, SARI 2016 Annual and International Colloquium, University of Paris 13. In Paris, before an academic audience, everything we said centred on the screening of a video piece that mixed together our two fields of interest: the sculptural experiments shaping contemporary art (Dorsett) and the long-established traditions of Indian dance now informing multicultural performance practices (Nair). Every presentation we give together reflects a “practice-based” approach to the possibility of dialogue between current visual art practices in the UK and Kathakali theatre as it is still performed in southern India. Recently we have been working on a particularly beautiful song by the Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore entitled Hriday aamaar prakash holo. Our attempts at advancing knowledge in relation to this wonderful piece, apparently as resonant i...

Extraordinary Renditions: the cultural negotiation of science

Group exhibition. Christine Borland, Fiona Crisp, Chris Dorsett. A British Science Festival event... more

Rawson’s Rasa: handling the taste of emotion

The authors of this paper, a British sculptor and a Kathakali dancer, reflect on the language-lik... more The authors of this paper, a British sculptor and a Kathakali dancer, reflect on the language-like signals of the hand (mudra) in Indian sculptural and theatrical traditions. As time-honoured symbolic gestures, mudras tell stories and express feelings. However, despite the significance of the multi-sensory body in India’s cultural history, the authors observe that no mudra seem to directly represent the sensory register of ‘taste’. Is this, following Serres (2009), a version of language despising gustatory sensations? One way of exploring this question is through the publications of Rawson (1963,1966, 1971, 1975), a British museum curator specializing in Indian Art who wrote extensively on the relationship between sculpture and dance in temples. He was particularly interested in Abhinavagupta’s influential interpretation of the Sanskrit verb “to taste” (rasa). In conversation Rawson likened the Kashmiri philosopher’s aesthetics to the enhanced ‘savouring” of wine on the tongue, expl...

Contemporary healthcare through the lens of the photographic arts

The Royal Photographic Society's 2012 Combined Royal Colleges Medal Lecture. Practice-led res... more

Studio Ruins: narrating “unfinishedness”

Five years ago I gave a paper at the conference Art Schools: Inventions, Invective and Radical Po... more Five years ago I gave a paper at the conference Art Schools: Inventions, Invective and Radical Possibilities (UCL, 2010). My topic was student studios as sites of panoptic scrutiny, as places without privacy (as in Bentham’s all-seeing disciplinary structure) or uninspected self-fashioning (as in Foucault’s institutionalised complicity). The thought had occurred to me as an improvisatory ‘riff’ on Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a publication that offered theories of poetry in which ‘strong’ present-day creative acts were said to fix their originality through a tactical ruination of past poetic success. With its discussion of misprision and kenosis, this famously problematic essay offered some provocative ideas for describing the sense of ruination that all art school tutors know shapes and informs studio learning throughout an artist’s career. I wondered if the current reliance on completist narratives of audience reception in art education could ever capture the di...

Semiotic Uncertainty and Resonant Presence

In his presentation, Chris Dorsett will discuss presence as a key attribute of the value of artwo... more In his presentation, Chris Dorsett will discuss presence as a key attribute of the value of artworks on display. For the past decade an expanding range of interdisciplinary literature has challenged the assumption that interpretation is the dominant mechanism by which value is attached to objects in museums and galleries. For example, the kind of thinking associated with the material turn in David Howes 'Empire of the Senses' (2004) or post-phenomenology in Jean-Luc Nancys 'Listening' (2007) suggests that representational and semiotic meanings inhibit important sensual interactions between the body, place and thing. Dorsett draws on his own practices as an artist, curator and PhD supervisor to explore the transformation of semiotic uncertainty into the experience of resonant presence in an art exhibition.

Glimpsing the archive

Glimpsing the archive is a conference paper that reflectively examines the significance of a set ... more Glimpsing the archive is a conference paper that reflectively examines the significance of a set of homemade shellac recordings from the 1940s lovingly preserved by Dorsett's family even though the records are too fragile to be played on a gramophone. Dorsett presents his first thoughts as an artist for a new body of graphic and photographic work exploring the fertile absence of functionality in museum stores. He offers a rationale for archive-only artworks that would be resolved, not as exhibits, but as interventions within the managerial and conservational life of reserve collections. Drawing on ideas from Walter Benjamin and the American poet Louise Gluck, ‘Glimpsing the archive’ describes how artworks might be productively placed within the insulating temporal interval made possible by archival practices.

Objects, knowledge and practice-led research