Matthew Bowman
I'm an art historian, theorist, and curator with a PhD from the University of Essex. My PhD dissertation, titled "October and the Expanded Field of Art and Criticism" analyses the art-critical journal October in relation to expanded, impure, notions of the art medium and its specificity. Within the dissertation, I mostly focus on the years 1976-81, a time which saw the birth of October, their important contribution to discussions of postmodernism within the visual arts, and the return of figurative painting under the guise of Neoexpressionism. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that rather than rejecting the issue of medium-specificity as a Greenbergian-modernist concern, October actively reconfigures medium-specificity in relation to processes of displacement and expansion.
For more details, email me!
Phone: Email me initially.
For more details, email me!
Phone: Email me initially.
less
InterestsView All (32)
Uploads
Papers by Matthew Bowman
The article appears both in the October 2024 issue of ArtReview and online (https://artreview.com/its-art-historian-aby-warburgs-world-were-just-living-in-it/)
The book is available here: https://danielandclara.com/Birding-book
It is a relatively more formal piece compared to its partner, "Dear Daniel & Clara," which was published in their book Birding.
In this case, "Curated Decay: Part Two" is being shown on in the "Make it Count" exhibition in the Power House on Orford Ness, which is on show until 27 October. The text is placed on the floor close to the entrance, which means that over time it will become decayed and possibly ruined by people stepping on it.
For information on the exhibition at Orford Ness, see here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/suffolk/orford-ness-national-nature-reserve/make-it-count-university-of-suffolk
Part Two shall be exhibited in the Power House on Orford Ness
An advance copy was published on the Journal of Art Historiography blog and will be officially published in issue 29, December 2023
The essay discusses the work of Tom Armstrong, Daisy Blower, Tom Bull, Iris Gunnarsdottir, Elsa James, Dion Kitson, Rudy Loewe, Rebecca Moss, Paul Westcombe and Josh C Wright.
Transitory conversations with reputable curators who engage positively with artistic practices driven by non-oppressive facilitation, alternative pedagogies, chronopolitics, and contemporary urgencies within the context of larger political, cultural, and economic processes. At this very moment in history, as well as raising some epistemological questions about redefining what is essential, this revelatory interview series attempts to bring together different critical approaches regarding international knowledge transfer, transcultural and transdisciplinary curatorial discourse. (Kisito Assangni)
English version: https://www.arshake.com/en/interview-matthew-bowman/
Italian version: https://www.arshake.com/intervista-matthew-bowman/
The article appears both in the October 2024 issue of ArtReview and online (https://artreview.com/its-art-historian-aby-warburgs-world-were-just-living-in-it/)
The book is available here: https://danielandclara.com/Birding-book
It is a relatively more formal piece compared to its partner, "Dear Daniel & Clara," which was published in their book Birding.
In this case, "Curated Decay: Part Two" is being shown on in the "Make it Count" exhibition in the Power House on Orford Ness, which is on show until 27 October. The text is placed on the floor close to the entrance, which means that over time it will become decayed and possibly ruined by people stepping on it.
For information on the exhibition at Orford Ness, see here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/suffolk/orford-ness-national-nature-reserve/make-it-count-university-of-suffolk
Part Two shall be exhibited in the Power House on Orford Ness
An advance copy was published on the Journal of Art Historiography blog and will be officially published in issue 29, December 2023
The essay discusses the work of Tom Armstrong, Daisy Blower, Tom Bull, Iris Gunnarsdottir, Elsa James, Dion Kitson, Rudy Loewe, Rebecca Moss, Paul Westcombe and Josh C Wright.
Transitory conversations with reputable curators who engage positively with artistic practices driven by non-oppressive facilitation, alternative pedagogies, chronopolitics, and contemporary urgencies within the context of larger political, cultural, and economic processes. At this very moment in history, as well as raising some epistemological questions about redefining what is essential, this revelatory interview series attempts to bring together different critical approaches regarding international knowledge transfer, transcultural and transdisciplinary curatorial discourse. (Kisito Assangni)
English version: https://www.arshake.com/en/interview-matthew-bowman/
Italian version: https://www.arshake.com/intervista-matthew-bowman/
October’s strictures against Neoexpressionism, however, did not constitute a rebuttal of painting tout court. Indeed, while photographic, site-specific, and discursive art practices were uppermost in their accounts of postmodernism, October also defended a limited selection of painting practices, especially those that eschewed or deconstructed the painterly.
This paper revisits that moment in the 1980s with two core aims in mind. Firstly, it seeks to analyse how the eruption of Neoexpressionism generated reflection into the language and procedures of art criticism. The battle over painting was, then, a battle over art criticism itself, as if painting and criticism had a particular and indelible stake within one another. And secondly, the paper will touch upon how October’s rejection of Neoexpressionism was a defence of painting—one answerable to an expanded field that October implicitly recognized but could not be theorized until much later.
The paper was delivered at the conference "And Painting Continues . . ." at the University of Nottingham on 30 May 2024
The lecture, delivered on 23 May 2024, is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the theme of the visual in James' ghost stories, while the second part considers James' literary output as an extension of the genre of landscape art.
Taking manifold forms, that fascination appears as images (“The Mezzotint”), the usage of vision-aiding instruments (binoculars in “A View from a Hill”), and a repeated engagement with the marginalia of ecclesial details in books and architecture. James, on occasion, seems enmeshed within the pictorial representations of John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough as if he was mapping a distinctly English literary version of the landscape that differs from the literary impressionism of a Joseph Conrad.
There is an easily missed darkness underpinning notions of the picturesque that thus becomes visible in James’ writings, almost as if there was no need for him to turn towards the genre of the gothic as such. Such darkness exists in a manner that coincides with the visual recording of the phantasmagorical in the late nineteenth century. This talk will therefore speculate on the distinct visualities operative in James’ ghost stories.
6:00 - 7:00 pm
Art Exchange
admission free
Join us for a talk by artist Hetain Patel, who will expand on ideas and themes explored in his work on show at Art Exchange.
Hetain Patel will be in conversation with Dr Matthew Bowman and together they will delve deeper into the insights and thinking behind his extraordinary work.
The talk will be followed by Q&A and the conversations can continue informally at our drinks reception.
Admission free – all welcome.
Biogs
Hetain Patel’s practice explores the subtle and often humorous complexities of life, and identity formation has been central to his concerns since the beginning of his career. His work has been shown worldwide in galleries, theatres and iconic public screens including Piccadilly Circus, London and Times Square, New York. His video and performance work online have been watched by over 50 million times, including his TED Talk entitled ‘Who Am I? Think Again’.
Patel is represented by Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, is a supported artist at Copperfield, London. He is winner of the Jarman Award (2019), Kino Der Kunst Festival Best International Film (2020), and was selected for the British Art Show 9, (2021/22). In 2021 Patel received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, a Henry Moore Foundation Award, declined a British Empire Medal and was a judge on the Sky TV Arts series ‘Landmark’. Recent projects include ‘Don’t Look at the Finger’, Tate St Ives (2023), ‘Finding Family’, Foundling Museum, London (2023), and Milk, Wellcome Collection, London (2023) and Hobby Cave with Artangel, London (2024 and ongoing).
Find out more about Hetain Patel here
Matthew Bowman lectures in fine art at the University of Suffolk and has published extensively in numerous periodicals, including regularly writing for ‘Art Monthly’. This has recently included a feature article entitled ‘Mirror, Mirror’ and guest speaker on their radio show.
He has also recently completed an essay titled ‘American-Type Art Criticism’ for the Journal of Art Histiography, and was invited to lecture at a prestigious conference dedicated to the influential writings of Hubert Damish at the Circulo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, Spain.
Find out more about Matthew Bowman here.
Speakers at the conference: Thierry Dufrêne, Matthew Bowman, Gabriel Cabello, Sabine Guermouche, Daniel Lesmes, Elisa Coletta, Teri Wehn-Damisch, Guillermo G. Peydró, and Georges Didi-Huberman
Artist Sam Durant will expand on the ideas behind the making of his work, including the placing of his drawings of fallen monuments back in public spaces, as he brings attention to questions of representation: who gets to occupy these spaces – and who gets to be heard.
We are also joined by curator and writer Jes Fernie who will tell us about her ‘Archive of Destruction’, a platform that brings together narratives around destruction and public art. Spanning a hundred years and many continents, it tells cumulative stories of vulnerability, interference, rage, fear, boredom and love.
The event will be chaired by art critic Matthew Bowman and a Q&A will be followed by a drinks reception at Art Exchange
Arguably, the clearest manifestation of this reemergence was Craig Owens’ 1980 two-part essay “The Allegorical Impulse.” Yet in its specific repudiation of what it takes to be Greenbergian modernism, it both announced postmodernism’s priority of allegory over symbol and allegorical interpretation against hermeneutics. Taken together, both positions seemingly constitute Romanticism’ final knell, specifically the Frühromantik that responded during the 1790s to Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies.
This paper will contend, perhaps despite itself, that Owens’ essay is a retrieval of the Frühromantik problematic rather than its final overturning. Somewhat unknowingly, Owens was part of the deconstructive reassessment that, in the 1970s, forged or acknowledged links between Poststructuralism and Romanticism in such a manner that questioned the symbol/allegory and hermeneutic/allegory divisions. Rather than its end, then, “The Allegorical Impulse” is Romanticism’s closure, one that reflects back upon the activity of art criticism as such. In this paper, I will seek to exploit the complexity of this closure, its incessantness, to outline how Owens reproduces, inverts, and destabilizes the Romantic oppositions he depends upon and demonstrates the continuing relevance of Romanticism in postmodernism.
https://ia802300.us.archive.org/5/items/2021-09-13-art-monthly-talk-show/2021-09-13-Art-Monthly-Talk-Show.mp3
Poetic Translations conference organized by Nicola Foster, Solent University, 16 December 2020.
Presented by Mark Lewis
Tom Snow, Maja and Reuben Fowkes & Matthew Bowman discuss activism as art, the ‘Southern Constellations’ exhibition in Ljubljana and Cory Arcangel’s show at Firstsite in Colchester.
For session: Art Historiography in the Expanded Field, convened by Samuel Bibby.
Speakers:
Stephen Bann
Samuel Bibby
James Boaden
Jessie Bond
Matthew Bowman
Mary Anne Francis
While most of Hubert Damisch’s major books have been made available in English since the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ review essay “Painting as Model,” it nonetheless remains a shame that Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium—the subject of Bois’ review—has not been translated. Although best known as a specialist in Renaissance art, the essays of Fenêtre show how Damisch’s distinct art-theoretical project emerges from his early writings on modernist and post-war painting, phenomenology, and structuralism.
This paper argues that Damisch’s writings and Bois’ essay serves as a crux for the October journal. October was at the forefront of the critique against painting during the early 1980s, but the publication of “Painting as Model” suggests a sea-change in the journal. I shall examine how Damisch’s entwining of phenomenology and structuralism, as a model for October that helped it revise its understanding of painting and for rethinking the relationship between art history and art criticism.
Conference abstract
21 Jun 2018
9.30am to 5pm
Yve-Alain Bois’ seminal text Painting as Model, published in 1990, is still cited as being an extremely important collection of essays that looks at painting as being both a conceptual and a material enquiry. Bois believes that one must concentrate on both the formal elements of a work of art and its physical qualities to fully understand its totality.
Schedule:
9.30 - 10.00 Registration
10.00 - 10.15 Daniel Sturgis: Welcome
10.15 - 11.15 Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne: Unframing painting, ‘pushing back the walls’
11.15 - 12.00 Moyra Derby: Models of Attention
12.00 - 12.15 Break
12.15 - 1.15 Dr Matthew Bowman: The Intertwining: Damisch, Bois, and October’s Rethinking of Painting
1.15 - 2.15 Lunch
2.15 - 3.15 Lisa Florman: Description and Resistance
3.15 - 4.00 Daniel Neofetou: A World for Us: On the Prefiguration of Reconciliation in Barnett Newman's Painting
4.00 - 4.45 Roundtable: Yve-Alain Bois and Eric Alliez. Chaired by Philip Armstrong
The symposium is free and open to all. Booking is essential.
Please use the booking form below to reserve your place.
Yve-Alain Bois will deliver an opening lecture to introduce this event on 20 June 2018.
Tickets for the keynote must be purchased separately: http://bit.ly/yve-alain-bois.
Painting as ReModel is convened by Daniel Sturgis, Reader in Painting and Programme Director of BA Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts. It is presented by the Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School Public Programme.
The aim of this paper is less to chart the historical reconceptualization of flatness, than it is to analyse fundamentally what is at stake in such a reconceptualization. It will argue that in discussing painting in terms of frontality and facingness, Cavell and Fried examine how the medium and in particular its surface-ness allows an “intersubjective” relation between artwork and beholder—a relation that is ultimately of ethical and political import. Whereas much of the paper will focus on a particular dialogue between Greenberg, Cavell, and Fried, the final part of the paper will consider the complex ‘paintings’ of Daniel Buren in which surface is rethought as an exteriority defined by material thickness and the weaving between recto and verso allegorical of art’s institutional enframedness. Finally, this paper seeks to imagine the painted surface not as something that covers over the canvas but radically as the necessary marker of painting’s depth.
The aim of this paper is to explore what might be considered the crux of Minimalist criticism. By ‘crux’, my intention is partly to historicize the writing produced under the aegis of Minimalism as situated between an explanation of art and a fundamental discursivity as art—in other words, as partaking in the discursive character typical of conceptualism without being identical to it yet. In that regard, it raises the presence another of another crux: a crux interweaving artwork and criticism. This second crux complicates the traditional separation of artwork as production and criticism as evaluative commentary, thereby problematizing their categorical identities and the presumed temporal ordering that typically flows from artwork to criticism. By attending to figures such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Fried, and Stanley Cavell, this paper seeks to examine how the writings around Minimalism interpreted but also fundamentally and actively produced Minimalism, thus indicating how these artworks pinpoint a major third crux, this time situated within the history of art criticism.
The aim of this paper is less to chart the historical reconceptualization of flatness, than it is to analyse fundamentally what is at stake in such a reconceptualization. It will argue that in discussing painting in terms of frontality and facingness, Cavell and Fried examine how the medium and in particular its surface-ness allows an “intersubjective” relation between artwork and beholder—a relation that is ultimately of ethical and political import. Finally, in this way, they understand the surface of painting as a form of Heideggerian “presence-ing,” and as a model for imagining the painted surface not as something that covers over the canvas, but rather surface as the necessary marker of painting’s depth.
This session understands the interrelations between painting and theory in the French scene as a ferment in which not only do painters respond to theoretical developments but those theories are determined by the practices of painting emergent in the period. Influential writings on art by figures such as Hubert Damisch, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Georges Didi-Huberman arguably cannot be fully understood without reference to those practices. Therefore, the hitherto scanty attention paid to French painting compels readdressing. Painting, Discourse thus invites scholars to contribute to overcome this art-historical lacuna. Moreover, it also encourages papers that explore the impact of this theory/painting ferment upon later art practices and theoretical understandings.
This symposium tackles another of Alÿs’ seminal projects, Seven Walks, staged in London during 2004-5. Commissioned by Artangel, these walks present Alÿs working in a very different geographical location and therefore potentially a very different social and political situation. Assembling a line-up of major speakers, this symposium is a multifaceted investigation that brings to light its artistic and political significance both within Alÿs’ oeuvre and a wider constellation of relevant contexts.
The relationships between art history and art criticism, then, seem characterisable as intersection, disconnection, and perhaps even non-communication, which further suggests different intersections/disconnections with the artwork. This session seeks to explore these relationships and encourage a more nuanced understanding of the relation between the two modes. Moreover, with art history being increasingly conceived as subsumable under an overarching programme of visual-cultural studies, and art criticism being simultaneously in a state of crisis and yet present everywhere through the 'blogosphere', it is arguably more crucial than ever to explore these relationships carefully. We invite contributors to examine these relationships, to consider the perceived cleavage between academic and 'journalistic' criticism, and other related topics.
Essentially, the dissertation is a close examination of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, arguing that this a temporally extended work (definitively unfinished, one might say) in which notions of authorship, dating, even its own status as a readymade are continuously undone and displaced. Hardly anyone saw Duchamp's readymade in 1917 and everybody since has only seen it at a remove. Indeed, the replicas seen in various museums are sculptural reproductions made to resemble the lost readymade exactly based on a photograph. In a way, this dissertation seeks to justify those replicas against the negative reception they (and Duchamp, too) garnered in the 1960s amongst artists you might imagine to be sympathetic towards Duchamp's practice.
The book is under contract to Routledge as part of their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series. Expected publication is 2019.