Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 3 of 7

Part 3: Esther Leslie - Houses of the Future Perfect: Freud, Benjamin and Schwitters’ Domestic Collections. This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. Speaker Biographies & Abstracts Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her first book was Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She has also authored a biography of Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007). In 2002 she published Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (Verso). It excavated the historical relationships between critical theory, European intellectuals and animation, in its avant garde and commercial varieties. Since then she has published and lectured extensively on all types of animation. A subsequent book, Synthetic Worlds: Art, Nature and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), investigated the industrial manufacture of colour and its impact on conceptions of nature and aesthetics. She runs a website together with Ben Watson, www.militantesthetix.co.uk Abstract: This talk considers the notion of the home-museum through three figures - Freud, Walter Benjamin and Kurt Schwitters. These three inhabitants prove to lodge in various ways with each other. For one, under the influence of Freud's dream analysis, Benjamin writes down a dream about Goethe's house, which he has visited before and in whose visitor's book he finds his name 'already entered in big, unruly, childish scrawl’ and at whose dinner table he finds places set for his relatives, ancestors and descendants. This will lead him to exclaim: when the ‘house of our life…is under assault and enemy bombs are taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations!’. Benjamin's other homes, his exile homes, real and those imaged - such as the cave-like arcades - are considered as repositories of 'perverse antiquities'. These homes are set alongside those of a fellow exile, Kurt Schwitters, who built for himself three 'Merzbau' home-museums, each one as incomplete as Benjamin's Arcades Project, each one wrecked by war, like that project too. Freud lodges now and again in these houses, and his own house-museum is considered as a practical instantiation of the project of realising memories objectively.