Upcoming Events

Cuts, Copies, Clips and the Curatorial: Cutting Edge

Conference, Lecture – Lynda Nead, Ben Cranfield, Craig Buckley, Dawn Ades, Nicola Simpson, Andrew Hodgson

  • 6 October 2021
  • 12:00 – 2:00 pm
  • An event as part of the multi-part conference programme 'Cutting Edge: Collage in Britain, 1945 to Now'
  • Online

12.00–12.05 Welcome by Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director, Paul Mellon Centre)

Panel 1

Chaired by Lynda Nead (Pevsner Professor of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London)

12.05–12.20 Ben Cranfield (Senior Tutor, Curatorial Theory and History, Royal College of Arts), ‘Fragmenting the Contemporary: The Queer Timeliness of Collage and the Curatorial in post-War Britain’

12.20–12.35 Craig Buckley (Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University), ‘An Architecture of Clipping: Reyner Banham and the Redefinition of Collage’

12.35–12.50 Panel 1 discussion & questions

12.50–13.00 Break

Panel 2

Chaired by Dawn Ades (Professor of History of Art at the Royal Academy)

13.00–13.15 Nicola Simpson (Research Impact Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts), ‘Not This and Not That: Cutting A(way) to a Tantric Buddhist Collage in the Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard’

13.15–13.30 Andrew Hodgson (University of London Institute in Paris), ‘Xeroxing Surrealism: TRANSFORMAcTION and Collage as Aesthetic Continuity’

13.30–13.45 Panel 2 discussion & questions

13.45–14.00 Multi-panel discussion

In collaboration with:


About the speakers

  • Headshot of Lynda Nead with window in background.

    Lynda Nead is Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on a range of art historical subjects and particularly on the history of British visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press). She has a number of advisory roles in national art museums and galleries and is a Trustee of the Holburne Museum and of Campaign for the Arts. She is currently writing a book called British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain.

  • Ben Cranfield Headshot

    Ben Cranfield is Senior Tutor in Curatorial Theory and History on the Curating Contemporary Art programme, Royal College of Art. His research is focused on the relationship of the curatorial to notions of the contemporary and the archive, asking what it is to be ‘with’ one’s time, stemming from his ongoing work into the histories of art institutions, the theory of archives, and shifting ideas of art and culture in postwar Britain. Recent articles include, “On (Not Being with) Time (Queerly) in Post-War Britain”, Performance Research, October 2018; “Mind the Gap: Unfolding the proximities of the curatorial”, Performance Research, September 2017; “All play and no work? A ‘Ludistory’ of the curatorial as transitional object at the early ICA,” Tate Papers, Autumn 2014.

  • Black and white headshot of Craig Buckley in front of a bookcase

    Craig Buckley is an associate professor of modern and contemporary architecture in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author most recently of Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s, (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). His essays have appeared in the journals Grey Room, October, Log, and Perspecta, and Texte zur Kunst, among others. He is the editor of numerous collections, including Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, (with Francesco Casetti and Rüdiger Campe, from University of Amsterdam Press, 2019), After the Manifesto: Writing, Architecture, and Media in a New Century (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines (with Beatriz Colomina, from Actar, 2011). He is currently at work on a new book with the working title The Street and the Screen, a media archaeology of the architectures of the moving image in the twentieth century.

  • Three-quarter profile headshot of Dawn Ades, in front of rose bushes

    Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy, a former trustee of Tate (1995–2005) and of the National Gallery (2000–2005) and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2013 she was appointed CBE for services to higher education.

    The many exhibitions she has organized or co-curated, in the UK and abroad, include Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: the Modern Era 1820–1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: The Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); and Dalí/Duchamp (Royal Academy and the Dalí Museum 2017–18). Apart from the catalogues associated with these exhibitions, publications include Photomontage (1986), Marcel Duchamp (with N. Cox and D.Hopkins, 1999), A Dada Reader (2006) and Writings on Art and Anti-art (2015).

  • Three quarter body image of Nicola Simpson, standing in front of a wall of framed prints

    Nicola Simpson is a curator and researcher at Norwich University of the Arts. Her research interests are focused on the performative and experiential influence of Zen and Tantric Buddhisms on transnational and transhistorical counter-cultural art and writing. She is editor of Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (Occasional Papers, 2012) and co-editor of Dom Sylvester Houédard (Richard Saltoun, Riding House, 2017). Other publications include, polyphonicportraits & mantraportraits & mantrayantras”, NOTES ONE –onos & nonos: an introduction to the book of onomasticons by dsh (Oxford: South Street, 2016) and ‘Attempts at Repairing the Universe: A Conversation between Nicholas Logsdail, Nicola Simpson and Charles Verey’, dsh, (Lisson Gallery, 2018).

    Recent exhibitions include: Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter (South London Gallery, 2012), Performing No Thingness: The Kinetic Poetry of Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ken Cox and Li Yuan-chia (East Gallery, 2016) and Dom Sylvester Houédard: tantric poetries (Lisson Gallery, 2020).

  • Headshot of Andrew Hodgson

    Andrew Hodgson is author of the monograph The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945–75 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), the novelesque Mnemic Symbols (Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) and editor of the experimental writing collections Paris (Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) and Experimental Praxis (Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021). He is translator from the French of Roland Topor’s Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne (London: Atlas Press, 2018) and from the Danish, Carl Julius Salomonsen’s New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness (Los Angeles: New Documents, 2021). He is currently researching and writing a book-length study of surrealism and the novel. He teaches in French and Culture Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris.