Sarah Chaplin

Alexandra Stara

Striking a balance between theoretical investigations and case studies, this book addresses the collection, representation and exhibition of architecture and the built environment. International in scope, this collection investigates curation, architecture and the city across the world, opening up new possibilities for exploring the urban fabric.

Curating Architecture and the City

Addressing the collection, representation and exhibition of architecture and the built environment, this book explores current practices, historical precedents, theoretical issues and future possibilities arising from the meeting of a curatorial ‘subject’ and an architectural ‘object’. Striking a balance between theoretical investigations and case studies, the chapters cover a broad methodological as well as thematic range. Examining the influential role of architectural exhibitions, the contributors also look at curatorship as an emerging attitude towards the investigation and interpretation of the city. International in scope, this collection investigates curation, architecture and the city across the world, opening up new possibilities for exploring the urban fabric.

The first volume in two centuries on Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments in Paris, this study presents a comprehensive picture of a seminal project of French Revolutionary cultural policy, one crucial to the development of the modern museum institution. The book offers a new critical perspective of the Museum's importance and continuing relevance to the history of material culture and collecting, through juxtaposition with its main opponent, the respected connoisseur and theorist Quatremère de Quincy. This innovative approach highlights the cultural and intellectual context of the debate, situating it in the dilemmas of emerging modernity, the idea of nationhood, and changing attitudes to art and its histories. Open only from 1795 to 1816, the Museum of French Monuments was at once popular and controversial. The salvaged sculptures and architectural fragments that formed its collection presented the first chronological panorama of French art, which drew the public; it also drew the ire of critics, who saw the Museum as an offense against the monuments' artistic integrity. Underlying this localized conflict were emerging ideas about the nature of art and its relationship to history, which still define our understanding of notions of heritage, monument, and the museum.

'Killing Art to Make History'

The Museum of French Monuments 1795-1816

The first volume in two centuries on Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments in Paris, this study presents a comprehensive picture of a seminal project of French Revolutionary cultural policy, one crucial to the development of the modern museum institution. The book offers a new critical perspective of the Museum's importance and continuing relevance to the history of material culture and collecting, through juxtaposition with its main opponent, the respected connoisseur and theorist Quatrem? de Quincy. This innovative approach highlights the cultural and intellectual context of the debate, situating it in the dilemmas of emerging modernity, the idea of nationhood, and changing attitudes to art and its histories. Open only from 1795 to 1816, the Museum of French Monuments was at once popular and controversial. The salvaged sculptures and architectural fragments that formed its collection presented the first chronological panorama of French art, which drew the public; it also drew the ire of critics, who saw the Museum as an offense against the monuments' artistic integrity. Underlying this localized conflict were emerging ideas about the nature of art and its relationship to history, which still define our understanding of notions of heritage, monument, and the museum.

?illing art to make history?

The Museum of French Monuments 1795?816

Tamás Bényei

A collection of essays by an international group of scholars, The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature addresses the vast cultural and discursive construction that trauma has become in recent decades. Unravelling aspects of representing, narrating, testifying to trauma and of sharing or conveying traumatic non-experience, many of the essays offer new perspectives on traditionally central topics of trauma studies, including shellshock, sexual abuse, the Holocaust, AIDS and 9/11, or on canonical trauma texts, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings. Some authors take issue with the at least partly commercially-motivated canonisation of trauma fiction, and with the automatic linking of certain textual features with traumatic experiences. In other essays, trauma works as an interpretative device that allows us to see otherwise familiar texts like Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and the fiction of Beckett and Agota Kristof in a new light. Other contributors interrogate less obvious cultural and artistic representations – including First World War British painting, Jean-Richard Bloch’s wartime writings, Félix González-Torres’s candy-spills, the photography of Peter Piller and Ori Gersht, and recent American television comedy – in the context of trauma, while one author explores her own artistic practice as part of the working through of traumatic experiences. The Edges of Trauma differs from other volumes concerned with trauma and art in that it gathers together essays on both literature and visual art. These essays are concerned with the relationship between trauma and art, traumatic non-experience and aesthetic experience; exploring how the non-experience of trauma finds its way into artistic representations.

Alexandra Stara

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