On behalf of the editorial board, we are proud to present the 2022 issue of Immediations. This edition of the journal brings together four articles, two reviews, and an interview with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, whose work Santa Barbara (2021-2022) enfolds over both sides of the issue’s cover. The scope presented in this issue of the journal is broad – from an eighteenth-century Indigenous North American pouch to twentieth-century Japanese Creative Prints, to a collection of personal and academic reflections on Russia’s obliteration of cultural heritage in Ukraine. And yet, a leitmotif also links the articles and reviews in this issue: an effort to resist the centre-periphery division of art historical discourse and to deconstruct still-dominant Euro-western-centric narratives surrounding class, gender, nationhood and imperialism, often through the close examination of objects that have historically been overlooked, neglected, or excluded. In doing so, the scholars of this issue each contribute their vision of the critical art historical practices for which Immediations seeks to be a platform.
In Evelyn Earl’s article, a seventeenth-century Netherlandish musket and its usage in homosocial performances at city militia exercises and pleasure hunts prompts an examination of the unstable codes of masculinity in the early modern Low Countries. Harvey Shepherd traces the seasonal migration of Savoyard people from Southeast France to Paris in search of work, compiling an archive of visual materials of an Alpine people traditionally left to the peripheries of French eighteenth-century art history. Mairead Horton investigates the possibilities for Native American agency within Indigenous American-European material exchange by tracing the myriad lives of an Iroquois pouch that Benjamin West collected and depicted in his history painting, The Death of General Wolfe (1770). Finally, as Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine continues to wreak havoc on millions of people, Katia Denysova brings together three Ukrainian scholars to reflect on the devastation of cultural heritage in their home country and envisage possible futures for Ukrainian cultural, architectural, and art histories.
Reviews by Nadine Nour el Din and Sungji Park discuss two exhibitions in the United Kingdom this year. Nadine Nour el Din muses on Ali Cherri’s solo exhibition, If you prick us, do we not bleed? (National Gallery, London), and its artistic reckoning with histories of trauma as they are encountered in and through damaged works in the museum’s collection. Sungji Park returns to Vision of a Moment: Japanese Prints 1950-1960 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford with a historical contextualisation of the Creative Prints movement and its legacy within wider Japanese art history.
On the cover of this year’s issue is a photograph of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s durational performance, Santa Barbara (2021-22), commissioned by the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow. In her conversation with the artist, Associate Editor Carla Kessler speaks to Kjartansson about his recent work. Meeting in the summer of 2022, they speak frankly about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Kjartansson’s subsequent withdrawal from the Moscow exhibition, discuss how performers and audiences experienced his recent works against the backdrop of war, and consider the potential for subversive acts within contemporary art spaces. Published here alongside Katia Denysova’s feature on Ukrainian cultural heritage, the texts illustrate the multifaceted ways in which writings on art can reckon with the ongoing crisis.
Now in its nineteenth year, Immediations continues to showcase rigorous and innovative research from The Courtauld Institute’s postgraduate students and early-career researchers. Reflecting the Institute’s diverse research clusters, it is committed to providing a platform for peer-reviewed studies of art, architecture, and conservation of all periods and across the globe. As the journal pivots to a more sustainable model, we are pleased to announce that Immediations has moved from a subscription-based journal to an open-access publication. The digital journal and the archive of previous issues can be found on The Courtauld’s website; and limited print copies will continue to be available at The Institute and select libraries.
We are grateful for the support of our External Advisory Group; Professor Alixe Bovey; Leyla Bumbra and the staff of the Research Forum; designers Hana Nihill (print) and Charlotte Roberts (online); Karin Kyburz (image rights); Bella Radenović (Editor-in-Chief, Immediations 2021); Ragnar Kjartansson, Lilja Gunnarsdóttir, Luhring Augustine and i8 Gallery; Vlada Ralko, Alevtina Kakhidze, Kateryna Kublytska, Pavel Dorogoy, Konstantin Brizhnichenko and Emmanuel Durand; Yoshiko Komai and Japan Artists’ Association Inc. Many thanks to Bloomberg Philanthropies for their continued support.
This issue of Immediations has been selected and edited by Damiët Schneeweisz and Fred Shan and the editorial board: Phoebe Day (Managing Editor & Reviews Editor), Florence Eccleston (Reviews Editor), Carla Kessler, Carole Nataf, Hattie Spires and Julia van Zandvoort (Associate Editors). For their exceptional work and dedication, they have our deepest gratitude.
Damiët Schneeweisz and Fred Shan (Editors-in-Chief)
Following the publication of Immediations 2022, it was pointed out to the editorial team that the inclusion of Ragnar Kjartansson’s interview and cover within the same issue as the feature piece on the war in Ukraine creates a potential conflict that should have been considered with more care. Having reflected on this, and following a constructive discussion, we wish to highlight here information that has come to our attention since. The V-A-C Foundation, which funded and exhibited Kjartansson’s Santa Monica, was founded and financially backed by Leonid Mikhelson, an oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin and a major shareholder of the gas company Novatek. Novatek has been under US sanctions since 2014 and Mikhelson himself has been under UK government sanction since April 2022. In addition, recognising ongoing debate as to whether Russian culture can be separated from its historical connection to Russian imperialism and contemporary manifestation under the Putin regime, we feel strongly that analyses of art, politics and history from the ‘post-Soviet space’ at this time require a great deal of nuance and sensitivity. Such work, at its best, can help to counter imperialist and chauvinist ‘Russocentric’ narratives–that have been actively used by the Putin regime to justify aggression–and instead amplify the voices of local Ukrainian scholars and work towards a decentring and decolonising of our discipline. We hope the points raised here serve both to provide new sources of information and remind us of the pressing need for such work. We sincerely thank the editors, contributors, and readers of Immediations for their rigorous engagement and careful insight.
Editorial Group
Damiët Schneeweisz and Fred Shan (Editors-in-Chief)
Phoebe Day
Florence Eccleston
Carla Kessler
Carole Nataf
Hattie Spires
Julia van Zandvoort
Publisher
The Courtauld Institute of Art
Somerset House, Stand, London WC2R 0RN
Immediations is published annually.
Further information:
http://courtauld.ac.uk/research/publications/immediations
© 2022 The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Designed by Hana Nihill
Printed by N2 Group with thanks to James Hallam
External Advisory Board
Susan Aberth (Bard College)
Simon Baker (Maison européenne de la photographie)
Djurdja Bartlett (London College of Fashion)
Tessel M. Bauduin (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Jane Bradney (Institute of Historical Research)
Wolfgang Brückle (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts)
Molly Brunson (Yale University)
Caroline Campbell (The National Gallery, London)
Annemarie Weyl Carr (Southern Methodist University)
Judith Clark (London College of Fashion)
David Peters Corbett (University of East Anglia and The Courtauld)
Finola O’Kane Crimmins (University College Dublin)
David Cunningham (University of Westminster)
Allison Deutsch (Birkbeck, University of London)
Julien Domercq
Michael Duffy (MoMA, New York)
Helen Evans (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Kate Flint (University of Southern California)
Michelle Foot (University of Edinburgh)
Jacob Gaboury (University of California Berkeley)
Rhonda Garelick (University of Nebraska- Lincoln)
Timothy Gitzen (University of Hong Kong)
Linda Goddard (University of St Andrews)
Pia Gottschaller (The Courtauld)
Ari Larissa Heinrich (Australian National University)
Isabel Horovitz (The Painting Conservation Studio)
Sarah James
Alexandra Kaczenski
Rebecca Karl (New York University)
Sabine Kriebel (University College Cork)
Deborah Lewer (University of Glasgow)
Anna Lovatt (Southern Methodist University)
Angeliki Lymberopoulou (Open University)
Vasileios Marinis (Yale University)
Malcolm Miles (University of Plymouth)
Martin Myrone (Tate Britain)
Diana Newall (Open University)
Jeanne Nuechterlein (University of York)
Anna Russakoff (American University of Paris)
Wendy Salmond (Chapman University, CA)
Stephanie Schwartz (University College London)
Nathaniel Silver (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum)
Camilla Smith (University of Birmingham)
Frances Spalding (University of Cambridge)
Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews)
Anne Rudloff Stanton (University of Missouri)
John-Paul Stonard (Burlington Magazine)
Lisa Turvey (Artforum)
William Tronzo (University of California San Diego)
Sarah Tyler Brooks (James Madison University)
Jane Tynan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Sabine Wieber (University of Glasgow)
Beth Williamson (University of Bristol)
Kim Woods (Open University)
Peter Zusi (University College London)
Cover
Ragnar Kjartansson, Santa Barbara, (2021-22), Durational performance, Directed by Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir. Staging and production: Lorem Ipsum Commissioned by V-A-C Foundation, Moscow; © Ragnar Kjartansson; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik. Photo: Misha Friedman / Based on the series originally created by Bridget and Jerome Dobson ‘SANTA BARBARA’ © 1984 TwentiethCenturyFox Television, all rights reserved
Immediations is an annual, peer-reviewed journal of art history. The editors welcome submissions from current members of the postgraduate research community of The Courtauld Institute of Art and from pre-doctoral and recent post-doctoral scholars who have spent part of their postgraduate career there.
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