‘Gesture’ conference write-up
Dr Mark Sheerin
With its cloisters, hidden quads, and green remove from the city streets, St John’s College Oxford is well geared towards the more solitary and sedentary aspects of the scholarly life. The setting is so rarefied and peaceful, one can hear the pages of antique books being carefully turned. That, at least is what a tourist, town dweller might imagine.
But the modern academic is, as it turns out, a much more active, sociable being. They arrive at conferences, stand at lecterns, deliver papers with gusto, and discourse with one another over sandwiches and coffee. There are myriad opportunities for the scholar to return awareness to their body and use it to communicate in a space more public than the office, home study or library booth.
In January 2024, both the still and the active aspects of university life were brought together for a three-day conference on ‘gesture’. It was billed as an investigation. The disciplines under scrutiny were to spill out from the college walls to include representatives from the worlds of art, dance, literature and film. Over the course of three quick-passing days, two dozen speakers got to the stage, addressed both peers and public, and occupied a grey area between performative action and thought. The outcome was to intensify our research and offer numerous ‘pointers’ to ideas that take the theme in a number of directions.
To the art historian gesture can mean brushstroke, which is a good place to start. A curator from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Professor Shelagh Vainker, was to cross town in order to present on the topic of Chinese Calligraphy. She illustrated her meticulous history of this highly skilled art form with illustrations from the permanent collection. These black ink characters were to offer a precise form of beauty, and her talk was to demonstrate that physical expression was to play an important role with the Calligraphic arts of China. Calligraphy like this may be ancient (it dates to 300 CE) but it still holds a gestural appeal for one of the most populous nations on Earth.
In some ways it took the West more than a millennium to catch up. Dr Charlotte de Mille from the Courtauld was to begin with a declaration of 1909, in which critic Roger Fry was to relocate the value of a brushstroke in gesture rather than visual acuity. Professor Alastair Wright, an Oxford art historian, was to follow this with an account of the hollow gestures with which numerous artists were to mimic Cézanne and Monet. It emerged from these two presentations that the very quality of a work of painting, or lack thereof, can emerge from the way in which one applies paint rather than the way that paint looks.
Nuance is called for, however. Oxford fellow and conference co-organiser Dr Jennifer Johnson was to share her work on Sandra Blow, a post-war painter whose work she demonstrated to be at once performative in method yet characterised by an abstruse, earthy palette. With little chance to lost oneself in figuration or aesthetic appeal, it was argued these works are Brechtian. Given Blow was working between 1947 and 1960, the height of the Cold War, such a materialist gesture was a loaded one.
Equally fertile research was shared by one of Johnson’s Oxford colleagues and co-organisers of the conference: Dr Rachel Coombes. Dr Coombes held forth on a fascinating and lesser-known aspect of the goings on at Salpetrière, the Paris asylum from which modern psychiatry emerged at the turn of the last century. In this singular context, hypnotically induced states and gestures were carefully staged for a live audience and intended to illustrate certain theories of Jean-Martin Charcot about the pathologies of various biblical figures. Charcot opposed the Catholic Church rather than Yankee imperialism, but like Blow he kept a cool head around gesture.
During this eclectic investigation, the fin de siècle debate about religion and the mid-century war of ideological symbols shared a stage with the more recent Culture War. Dr Lee Triming, an artist and tutor from the city’s Ruskin School of Art gave a spirited performance in which he called for a heroic resistance to gesture, fuelled by a panoply of queer heroes working in non-narrative dance, cubist literature, sci-fi sculpture and minimalist painting. Dr Triming’s exuberance was as engaging as it was winning, not least in his account of the time he walked into a library plate glass window.
Despite his stance on gesture Dr Triming was one of the three-day event’s most animated and mobile presenters. He also got one of the biggest rounds of applause.
Generous applause, a wonderful gesture, was enacted without a second thought over and over again across the eight sessions. Just as a gallery of sculpture can promote a feeling of corporeal awareness in the visitor to a museum, so too were there self-conscious moments at a conference on gesture. I obviously cannot speak for the rest of the participants and audience members, but I was led to reflect on my own body language throughout and, above all, by a chance encounter in the canteen.
Forgive the digression, but I was sat with a plate of food for lunch at an empty table. A woman of great poise approached, caught my eye and offered to join me. When I asked how she came to be involved, this disarming lady told me she was in conversation at the final event of the first day, That was when I realised that I was having lunch with a choreographer of world renown. “You’re Siobhan Davies!” I blurted. She asked me about my presentation and after telling her that I was hoping to avoid the look and feel of an after-dinner speech, Siobhan Davies, the world-renowned-choreographer, began to give me tips and effectively choreographed my paper for me!
Dance was as important to this event as art, another surprise for those who might think that life in an Oxford college was a 24/7 poring over books. There were screenings of excerpts from two of Davies’ poetic films. In conversation with artist Mark Rowan-Hull, she was to talk about walking, about the body, about animality and gesture. Another great mover whose film work stood out was Dr Nina Danino from Goldsmiths who took the very brave step of playing us a home video in which she danced in front of her fireplace, alone, and as if unwitnessed, for several long minutes during one of those long and soon forgotten days of pandemic lockdown. If this was too much, that was the idea. Danino explained how for her gesture is entwined with excess.
Edward Said once called musical performances an ‘extreme act’. This was explained by Professor Jonathan Cross, who was here on a break from his duties as Oxford don and presenter on BBC Radio 3. Professor Cross was to contrast a certain emphasis on physical presentation in activities of conducting and playing instruments with a twentieth century avant garde that denied the body in favour of programmatic, aleatory and electronic musical techniques. We were to discover that music has a truly conflicted relation to the body. Dr Tim Coombes also took the opportunity to offer a check to the contemporary and historic conflations of dance and music in favour of a Brechtian prescription for non-mimetic movement to accompany music.
The world(s) of literature perhaps were more in keeping than modern painting, music and dance, with the peaceful atmosphere of a sixteenth century college setting. Professor Heather Webb, from the University of Cambridge, seemed completely at home during her paper on both text and medieval illustration of the Divine Comedy. Dante had variations of gesture pegged to vice and virtue. Later, Professor Peter McDonald from Oxford University gave a paper which might have been heaven or purgatory, depending on your attitude to critical theory. With a title that could have been invented by Jacques Derrida (but was in fact a recent invention by an artist and academic from Canada, John Cayley,) Grammalepsy was to bring each and every gesture within the ambit of language. It felt like an important paper, albeit a challenging one.
Both hard and easy to digest, there was an utter feast for thought at ‘Gesture’. The thorough and exhaustive approach, in which researchers across so many areas were to come together to share knowledge offered satisfactions, which single-discipline conferences might not always achieve. The marathon-like approach was shared by Mark Rowan-Hull, an artist whose musical paintings were one of the impetuses behind the event. At the close of the second day, Rowan-Hull staged a performance in which he and a group of collaborators improvised for a full 90 minutes.
During this time, he was to paint on canvas and clear Polyurethane; respond to both oboe and percussion; weave in and out of the trajectory of an interpretative dancer; give room to a singer, who was also fully improvised; and sit back at three staging points; during which critic, artist and broadcaster Matthew Collings, also on the stage, would offer his thoughts about the work, with a nod to abstract expressionists. We were, for a time, back with brushstrokes.
In conclusion, I don’t know whether ‘Gesture’ shifted my impressions of St John’s or whether St John’s shifted my impressions of gesture. I would not have anticipated from a walled-off Oxford college, the welcome it gave to a few delegates from the general public. Throughout the three days I got to meet a local healthcare worker whose interest in art meant that she was giving up her days off to be here. I also met a young American tourist who was so engaged with the presentations he was soon asking questions of the various speakers. He simply put up his hand, a universal gesture of enquiry which embodied this comprehensive boundary-pushing investigation.