Mark Rawlinson
Lecturer, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Expertise Summary
My academic work is focused on 20th/21st Century American art, photography and visual culture. I have written extensively on the artist/photographer, Charles Sheeler, publishing a monograph, Charles Sheeler: Modernism , Precisionism and the Borders of Abstraction with IB Tauris in 2007. I am still engaged with Sheeler, and have just finished an essay which examines the role of convention in Sheeler's work and the art historical category of Precisionism. Rather than address these issues chronologically, my analysis begins with Sheeler's late work , and works backwards, examining and deconstructing the popularly held, that is, conventional view, of his work. Most recently I published American Visual Culture with Berg (2009); in this book I explore the theories of visual culture studies and set them to work against a wide-ranging analysis of cultural production in the USA from the late-nineteenth century to the present day; from early landscape images that excused land-clearance and genocide to lynching photography, 1950s suburban anxities to the proliferation of advertising imagery in American art of the 20th century. The aim of my work is to study images and their production and to understand how the gain their meaning both historically and for contemporary culture. Most recently my research has focused more on photography and the American landscape, looking in particular at New Topographics photography of the 1970s (Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Joe Deal, Lewis Baltz). New Topographics has come to be seen as a defining moment in American photography - and yet the conceptual grounds of the 'movement' have been subject to little examination. For example, the importance of European photography (Frederick Sommer, etc.) and of the conceptual art practices (for example, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dan Graham) have not been considered at all.
I have a long standing interest in critical and visual theory, especially Theodor Adorno, but am also interested in the work of Freud, Deleuze, Bataille and Derrida.
PhD Supervision
I would welcome proposals that relate to any aspect of 20th century American art, especially early American modernism, American photography, visual culture, and critical/visual theory.
Teaching Summary
My teaching is focused upon American art, photography and visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, and draws upon visual, critical and aesthetic theory.
Research Summary
I am working on issues surrounding 'New Topographics' photography; so I've been researching the history of American photography leading up to 'New Topographics' and also what's happened since. The… read more
Recent Publications
MARK RAWLINSON, 2013. “Like Trading Dust for Oranges”: Ed Ruscha and Things of Interest. In: JEFF BROUWS and HERMANN ZSCHIEGNER, eds., Various Small Books: Referencing the Books of Ed Ruscha (In Press.)
RAWLINSON, MARK, 2010. Marek Tobolewski: Taking a Line (Exhibition Catalogue Essay) Marek Tobolewski: Continuum in Symmetry, exhibition catalogue essay, Nottingham: Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre At: Nottingham: Djanogly Art Gallery
RAWLINSON, MARK, 2010. Out of Sight, Out of Mind (exhibition catalogue essay) for Jeff Brouws, Excerpts from the Narrative, Tony Tapies Gallery, Barcelona At: Barcelona
Current Research
I am working on issues surrounding 'New Topographics' photography; so I've been researching the history of American photography leading up to 'New Topographics' and also what's happened since. The debates about photography after conceptual art have also got me wondering about photography BEFORE conceptual art . It is fair to say 'New Topographics' is now considered a pivotal moment in photography generally - although no-one really noticed the original show at the time - which has set me wondering: how pivotal is NT really? What are the conceptual and historical grounds for NT, and do they make sense? Plus, what else was going on at the time (and long before) and which photographers were simply overlooked then (and, of course, now). To make sense of a lot of information - photographers, galleries, dealers, movements, even technical developments - I've become interested in Network Theory and Social Network Analysis as a means to help map this terrain; I am planning to translate all this material into a visualized three-dimensional digital 'map', too. I am still working on Sheeler, especially his late work and how it relates to the American experience of WWII; I'm also writing a piece on his 'domesticated modernism' as a contribution to the 'The Everyday in American Visual Culture' edited book I'm working on with John Fagg (for University of Liverpool Press). Finally, I am writing the essay for a book (with Jeff Brouws and Hermann Zschiegner) provisionally called 'Various Small Books' which contains homages to/appropriations of Ed Ruscha's photobooks, to be published by Steidl. As such I'm researching notions of the 'project', and strategies such as appropriation and copying.
Past Research
My PhD thesis, 'Charles Sheeler and the Dissenting Line: An Adornian Critique' (Supervisor: Professor Douglas Tallack, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham), we revised an appeared as 'Charles Sheeler: modernism, precisionism and the borders of abstraction' with IB Tauris in 2007. Sheeler remains readily associated with Precisionism but his work is more contentious and radical than this category has ever conceived. Precisionist criticism sees Sheeler through too narrow a focus - a machine age aesthetic - and argues harmony - whether between painting and photography, realism and abstraction, the past and the present - is the best measure of the artist's most successful work (around 1931). The thesis/book argues against this reductionist perspective, drawing on Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, in order to consider dissonance - the dissenting lines in Sheeler's so called precisionism - as an absolutely crucial feature of his work; even those works presumed to epitomise harmony - e.g.Home, Sweet Home - are actually visual essays in dissonance. The thesis argues that dissonance in Sheeler reveals the artist as not quite so at home with American modernity or with modernism but that this is what marks out his work as radical and important.
The Sheeler book is to a degree engaged with American exceptionalism, and my second monograph, American Visual Culture is a hybrid-text, combining original research with theoretical exegesis. The text explores and explains the visualisation of American exceptionalist ideology-from Westward Expansion to the millennium marking 'American Century' exhibitions-through a variety of theoretical approaches and across media: art and exhibitions, posters, movies and television, war and lynching photography, advertising and magazine illustration