A messy plurality (slide talking again)

What follows is a short extract from a presentation about my arts-based activities in the 1980s and 1990s at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Much of what happened was related to the notion of an ‘expanded field’, a widely employed approach theorised by the art critic Rosalind Krauss in her influential essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979). On this basis I began to reject gallery exhibiting and, as a result, marked out a pedagogically charged ‘field’ situated between art schools and museums. The presentation recreated the slide talk I developed to convey what happened in Oxford to arts schools and collection-holding institutions in Sweden, Finland, Hong Kong and Brazil.

Text: A messy plurality was the point. It was messiness that licensed all sorts of engagements with all sorts of museum things.

Text: The mess had a narratological dimension. The mechanism that transmitted this museum idea through its many manifestations was the Kodak carousel projector.

Text: These are 35mm transparencies used in those machines. Like all art school tutors, my photographic archive was once mounted in plastic frames like this. They were loaded into the circular ‘carousels’ so that, one by one, the images would drop into the breech of the projector and appear on the screen. But this process momentarily plunged everything into darkness as the machine executed the transition.

Text: Back then, I only had a carousel, in which the slides became increasingly mixed-up as I moved from talk to talk. With each noisy drop of an image into the projection gate, both slide-talker and audience would sit in darkness hoping that what appears next fits with the story.

Reference: My presentation Marks in a field / Plus marks in a field was created for the Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology research seminars at the Pitt Rivers Museum. It involved two screens. One showed the museum work that was the topic of the seminar, the other displayed the heavily annotated script I was reading from as I made the presentation. See https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/event/marks-field/plus-marks-field

Reference: Andrew Ballantyne’s review of Thirteen Ways: Theoretical investigations in architecture, by Robert Harbison. Published in the TLS in 1997.

Thirteen Ways may have been intended as a commentary to a sequence of slides selected for their visual power and thematic relevance. In a lecture, the audience is presented with an image, and held for a moment in suspense as it wonders how this will be linked to the theme, so there are anticipations and resolutions as the talk progresses … Harbison’s prose has the insistent rhythm of a carousel of slides changing from one to the next, two or three times on a page, but producing again and again a dark screen.