Mary Anne Francis

Bio: Mary Anne Francis is an academic researcher from University of Brighton. The author has contributed to research in topics: Anthropology of art & Art methodology. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 10 publications receiving 25 citations. Previous affiliations of Mary Anne Francis include University of the Arts London.

The dark side of art’s social turn: towards a discourse on the impact of art’s use of social forms upon the social

Abstract: The recent “social turn” in art, in which art favours using forms from social life above its own, has been extensively discussed. Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many by Grant Kester, essays by Claire Bishop who supplies the term “the Social Turn,” and her recent publication Artificial Hells, are now as important to the field as the art they scrutinise. Ironically, however, when this discussion regards the implications of the “turn”, it habitually addresses the effects of this development from – and for – art’s point of view, overlooking the way in which artists’ inroads into social life may be differently regarded in the social realm. As much as this represents a failure to illuminate a particular area for knowledge, it also signifies a failure to take art’s revalorised commitment to the social to its ethical conclusion: such, from two perspectives, is the “dark side” of art’s social turn. This article seeks to mitigate these oversights. In particular, ...

Defending academic freedom: Arts and Humanities research as constrained writing:

Abstract: This article notes that while there is a large literature lamenting increasing assaults on academic freedom, there is little literature to address ways in which it might be preserved. Sampling that...

Dirty work: art beyond ‘autonomy’

Abstract: Across Europe there are signs that art's relationship to work is changing in a way that calls for new analytic categories. The era of art's autonomy is on the wane as artists increasingly pursue practices involving work in the world, where not so long ago they favoured doing art's own work. This article establishes the grounds for those claims. First, it looks at art's 'autonomy' (via recent theory from Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Michael Lingner) in order to assess the nature of the work done by much of twentieth century Western art. Then, taking the work of the Danish (art) collective, Superflex, as typical of these new practices, it analyses how autonomy is being rejected. Deciding that Michael Lingner's concept of 'post-autonomy' is helpful in describing and thinking about such work, it concludes by referring uses of that term to the notion of 'relative autonomy'.

Here and there: an artist's writing as aesthetic form

Abstract: Developing the recent interest in ‘art-writing’, this one-act play explores one aspect of that area: specifically, an artist's writing. The monologue adapts Mieke Bal's notion of art history, written from the place of its objects, to invoke the idea of an artist's writing as writing by and as an artist. Contending that this is writing as aesthetic form, the play's ‘Speaker’ proposes that an artist's writing is distinct from other forms of discourse about art precisely by virtue of its aesthetic dimension. The speaker defines ‘aesthetic’ via Hegel's notion of the arts as a symbolic discourse in which the signifier is visible, and ‘motivated’ by its signified. In a Hegelian scheme, this makes the arts inferior, and hence makes the task of defending aesthetic writing, which takes up the rest of this drama, all the more urgent. The case is made with reference to pedagogic pragmatics, cultural politics, ethics and therapeutics: Barthes' ‘pleasure of the text’ – with which the text concludes.

Media Mutandis: a NODE.London Reader

Abstract: The NODE.London Reader projects a critical context around the Season of Media Arts in London March 2006 and provides another discursive dimension to the events of October 2005's Open Season. It engages debates in FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software), media arts and activism, collaborative practices and the political economy of cultural production in the present day. It includes essays and artist projects from Sabeth Buchmann, Toni Prug, Armin Medosch, Simon Yuill, Chad McCail, Critical Art Ensemble, Jo Walsh, Richard Barbrook, Michael Corris, Harwood, Kate Rich, Agnese Trocchi, Matthew Fuller, Rasmus Fleischer and Palle Torsson, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Matteo Pasquinelli and Francis McKee.

The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context

Abstract: The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context Grant H. Kester Durham, Duke University Press, 2011 320 pp., ISBN: 9780822349877 The ‘one’ in the title of this wide-ranging...

Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art

Abstract: that the hero of cognitivism is still David Marr, who never sought to understand human vision directly but instead to develop machine vision. In an enlightening discussion, Pizzo Russo discusses the works of Howard Gardner and points out the way in which his thinking frustrates the placement of artistic thought in any mainstream context. Gardner, who posited the existence of numerous intelligences, effectively created a barrier of commonality between scientific and artistic intelligence. The way that a basic notion of intelligence is translated through various media—preserving a common definition of intelligence while at the same time respecting the difference of its manifestation—is instead captured in Arnheim’s idea of representational development. This preserves general notions of intelligence that only find a particular manifestation in artistic products. Ironically, a psychology of art turns out to be an eminently general psychology of cognition. Pizzo Russo’s reflections on mental imagery in Chapter Three are equally negative, noting as they do the Pyrrhic victory of the imagists over the symbolists. According to Pizzo Russo, Philip Johnson-Laird, for example, insists so vehemently that his mental models are not visual that the possibility of a final overcoming of symbolism is impossible. The chapter on color stands quite well alone and treats several issues facing those interested in art and psychology. This book is the fruit of many years work at the intersection of art and science. Working in the Italian tradition, Pizzo Russo does not have to worry about the American feel-good narrative of the “Mind’s New Science” of cognitivism. If we have learned so much about the mind, why is our understanding of art so poor? The ideology of mainstream psychological science accords Arnheim a respected position, but only historically. Perhaps if cognitivism is a true science, we will have to remember with Newton that a science is built on the shoulders of giants.