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Current Teaching
Bernard is the Fine Arts tutor in Modern Art for the MA in Fine and Decorative Art. His lectures range from sublime painting at the end of the eighteenth century to Constant’s New Babylon project in the late twentieth. He also teaches Critical Approaches to Photography for the MA in Photography.
Research Interests
The rise of modern art coincided with astonishing developments in technology that transformed everyday life. Art did not stand aloof from these changes but produced a range of responses to them, from enthusiasm to denial or scepticism. Modernist art is often presented as a direct consequence of technological advances and the rise of the metropolis. Bernard’s work seeks to uncover and complicate the nature of that connection, particularly in its implications for the individual subject.
Artists also involved themselves with emergent print and broadcast technologies, producing advertisements for companies, the State or even themselves. What is the relationship to mass culture? How did artists address a mass audience? And how did those technologies influence the art works themselves?
Biography
Bernard studied at the universities of East Anglia and Nottingham before completing his PhD at the London Consortium (Birkbeck College, University of London; Architectural Association; Institute of Contemporary Arts; and Tate), writing on avant-garde art in England during the first half of the twentieth century. He has taught at Birkbeck College, London Metropolitan University and Tate. His published or forthcoming work includes essays for Visual Culture in Britain, Textual Practice, The International Journal of the History of Sport and Literary London as well as reviews for Contemporary, Textual Practice and New Formations.
He is interested in all areas of artistic production from the nineteenth century to post-WWII work. He has a strong background in theoretical issues, which he teaches in an accessible way.
Selected Publications
Book
Editor, Eyeing London (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2002).
Essays
(forthcoming 2011) ‘Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912-13’. International Journal of the History of Sport. Special issue, The Visual Turn in Sports History, eds. Mike O’Mahony and Mike Huggins. Simultaneously published in The Visual Turn in Sports History, eds. Mike O’Mahony and Mike Huggins (London: Routledge, 2011)
’Oversights in Overseeing Modernism: A Symptomatic Reading of Alfred H. Barr Jr’s “Cubism and Abstract Art” Chart. Textual Practice, 24:2 (April 2010), pp. 255-286.
‘“The Most Wonderful and Complex City in the World”: London and the Camden Town Group’. Literary London, 8:1 (March 2010) http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/index.html until September 2010, then in archive under March 2010 issue.
‘On the Wings of a Dove: Jacob Epstein’s Doves – Third Version, 1914-15’ in Understanding Art Objects: Thinking Through the Eye, ed. Tony Godfrey (London: Lund Humphries, 2009), pp. 132-143.
‘Enigma Variation: Edward Wadsworth’s “Marine Still-Lifes” and Giorgio de Chirico’. Visual Culture in Britain 7:1, pp. 39-58.
(with Michael Uwemedimo), ‘Unknowable London: An Interview with Patrick Keiller’ in Eyeing London, pp. 35-59.
‘It’s all Crap … Scatological Elements in Kurt Schwitters’s Hanover Merzbau’ in Arcade, ed. Nina Pearlman, pp. 126-144.
Conference Papers
‘Painting in France, Spain and Italy in the early Modern Period’. Introductory talk at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution’s ‘Modernism Weekend’, Bath, 16-17 October 2010
‘Pedal-Powered Avant-Gardes: Cycling Paintings in 1912-13’, ‘The Visual in Sport’, University of Bristol, 13-14 June 2009.
“Smiling Insinuatingly”: Wyndham Lewis and the Mass Media’, ‘Modernism and Visual Culture: An Interdisciplinary Conference’, University of Oxford, 1-2 November 2008.
‘Divided by a Common Language? German and Soviet Photomontage’, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 18 October 2008.
‘“The Most Wonderful and Complex City in the World”: London and the Camden Town Group’, ‘Modernity and Metropolis: Camden Town Study Day’, Tate Britain, 12 April 2008. (podcast at: http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/)
Panellist for Tate Liverpool’s one-day symposium ‘Paul Nash: Landscape, Identity and Britishness’, 18 October 2003.
Chair for presentation by Patrick Keiller of his ‘City of the Future’ project, Tate Modern, 31 July 2003.
Book Reviews
Contemporary 81 (2006). Review of Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture.
Contemporary 70 (2005). Review of Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods.
Contemporary 56 (2004). Review of (ed.) Parveen Adams, Art: Sublimation or Symptom.
Contemporary 50 (2003). Review of (eds) Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr, Autopia: Cars and Culture.
New Formations, 36 (1999). Review of James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Textual Practice, 12:1 (1998). Review of Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism and (ed.) Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Marxism and Postmodernism.
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+44 (0) 20 7462 3232