Connecting Principle is an art centred international multi-disciplinary research forum at Newcastle University instigating a dialogue between art and other disciplines. The aim of the forum is to increase opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration within academia and independently. Connecting Principle sees itself as an international network of artists, theorists and researchers.

ART HISTORY
Jonathan Watkins,
direktor of IKON Gallery, Birmingham
Thursday, 8 March 12, 5pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University

For too long in the west those working with contemporary art have tended to repudiate art history. This is a legacy of modernism, an ideology that insisted on every new art movement surpassing the one before, and thus young, emerging artists tend to be fetishised. Like vampires, exhibition curators crave fresh virgin blood, and what has gone before is deemed uninteresting, unadventurous. Students here are rarely taught about any art that is dated before 1900, by which time the seeds of modernism had been well and truly sown.
Art practice without art history is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? Well, maybe, maybe not, but certainly a constant emphasis on the avant garde means that a lot of good art work gets overlooked due to eyes being fixed on what lies ahead. For myself, I am concerned to be part of a global art conversation in which it is important to make statements that are pertinent, relevant and not detached from current (art) affairs, but this doesn't mean that art history has nothing to offer.
Postmodernism wasn't so bad. The word itself ("postmodernism") became tired and uncool, and certainly aesthetic crimes were committed with a superficial understanding of the theory, but the postmodern attempt to reset the whole artistic machine was laudable. The cut-and-paste styles, the camp appropriations were awful, but the idea that we could be eclectic, instead of purist - that we could have both David Bowie and Beethoven on our playlists - was like a breath of fresh air. 'Why not?' was the right question, and it still is because, still, the aspiration to the condition of fashion in art persists. Art itself is a kind of fashion, as history teaches us that there hasn't always been art. Kitagawa Utamaro, recently shown at Ikon, had no idea of "art", as we now understand it, when he made his beautiful woodblock prints. Art came later, with Europeans, c.1850. Utamaro's pictures were not made by him to be put in frames on museum walls but instead to be collected for a very small amount of money (the equivalent of three bowls of rice) and then passed around, hand to hand, amongst a group of friends. As art they sell for thousands and thousands.
I have come to the conclusion after many years of working in the art world that, paradoxically, those artists who don't care so much for art are the most interesting ones. The ones who aren't so precious, not so married to an artistic identity, are usually the best, and this encourages me to think that art, as a kind of pseudo-religion, will not always be with us.

Jonathan Watkins has been Director of Ikon Gallery since 1999. Previously he worked as Curator of the Serpentine Gallery and Director of Chisenhale Gallery. His tenure at the Chisenhale Gallery saw a rise in its international profile, with a number of its artists moving on to win the Turner Prize. He was Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney in 1998 and has worked internationally in Beijing, Venice, Turin, Milan, Shanghai, Sharjah and Palestine. He was also on the curatorial team for Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art (Hayward Gallery, London 2001). Watkins is a prolific writer on contemporary art, his recent essays focusing on the work of artists such as Giuseppe Penone, Martin Creed, Yang Zhenzhong, and Noguchi Rika. He was the author of the Phaidon monograph on Japanese artist On Kawara.

http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk