Kenneth R. Allan | University of Lethbridge (original) (raw)

Papers by Kenneth R. Allan

Canadian journal of history, Sep 1, 2007

Canadian Journal of History, 2007

This collection of essays deals with the issues that animated Conceptual art in the Anglophone wo... more This collection of essays deals with the issues that animated Conceptual art in the Anglophone world. It offers readers a wealth of new research on the earliest international exhibitions of Conceptual art, new interpretation of some of its most important practitioners, and a reconsideration of ...

Public, Jan 5, 2002

This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist... more This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist Bernar Venet, one of the original practitioners of Conceptual art.

Art Journal, 2014

Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when consideri... more Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when considering North American art of the late 1960s and early 70s whose aim (rather than being the sole object of attention itself) is to direct attention to seldom noticed phenomena, veiled areas of the artworld, and what McLuhan refers to as the ground rules of society, “a kind of overall enveloping force”. Readers may recognize in the counter-environment the later theoretical ideas and activities of “institutional critique,” a term that is too seldom considered either as a technique or in relation to the complex intellectual lineage that it draws upon. I will provide a partial historical and theoretical ancestry for McLuhan’s counter-environment and will suggest its utility for understanding works of some North American artists of the period, including Dan Graham, John Cage, Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Richard Serra, in order to draw attention to the diversity of work that can be informed by reference to the counter-environment. Doing so may additionally assist in broadening our understanding of the theoretical options available at this time, while also complicating for readers what has become known as institutional critique. Note: This is a text-only version of the article. To access the article as published, click on the tandfonline.com link.

October, 2013

Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 ... more Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 cm) is an unprecedented painting in which the thin vertical painted stripe is only slightly narrower than the canvas itself. The painting is context dependent and, given its extreme dimensions and the limitations of visual perception, The Wild cannot do otherwise than to produce a perceptually heightened surround as much as it attracts attention to itself. The essay considers the perceptual problems arising from the unusual dimensions of the work, and the related consequences of framing, or not framing, The Wild.

Imaginations Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies/revue d études interculturelle de l image

The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under... more The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author's original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions.

Imaginations, 2017

Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the counterenvironment is within a larger tradition of defamiliariza... more Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the counterenvironment is within a larger tradition of defamiliarization that emerges in Romanticism and can be further traced through the writings of Henri Bergson, English literary modernism, Russian formalist ostranenie, Brechtian estrangement, and more recent institutional critique.
Among related Romantic writings, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry” of 1821 clearly anticipates later theories that both repeat and continue to develop fundamental notions of defamiliarization. Bergson’s writings on the comic revive Romantic ideas when he states that the object of the arts is “to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.” English modernists such as T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, and their contemporaries drew on Bergson and were major sources for McLuhan’s counterenvironment. Russian formalist and English modernist defamiliarization share roots in Romanticism and Bergson, which account for their sometimes-parallel perspectives. McLuhan had some limited exposure to Russian formalism by way of Constructivist cinema as well as the art and writings of László Moholy-Nagy. Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie is mistakenly understood by some later writers to be at the origin of defamiliarization, although it was a point of departure for Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect.” McLuhan began using the term “counterenvironment” not long before some artists, who were aware of McLuhan’s writing on the subject, started to direct the audience’s aestheticized attention to the situation’s contextual framework rather than to discrete objects alone. Like the counterenvironment, later institutional critique proposed a Gestalt reversal of attention by turning the environmental ground to figure.
McLuhan’s theory of the counterenvironment, and the variations of defamiliarization more generally, are historically specific while they also partake in transformative historical processes that involve a fusion of communication, change, continuity, and repetition.

Art Journal, 2014

Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when consideri... more Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when considering North American art of the late 1960s and early 70s whose aim (rather than being the sole object of attention itself) is to direct attention to seldom noticed phenomena, veiled areas of the artworld, and what McLuhan refers to as the ground rules of society, “a kind of overall enveloping force”. Readers may recognize in the counter-environment the later theoretical ideas and activities of “institutional critique,” a term that is too seldom considered either as a technique or in relation to the complex intellectual lineage that it draws upon. I will provide a partial historical and theoretical ancestry for McLuhan’s counter-environment and will suggest its utility for understanding works of some North American artists of the period, including Dan Graham, John Cage, Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Richard Serra, in order to draw attention to the diversity of work that can be informed by reference to the counter-environment. Doing so may additionally assist in broadening our understanding of the theoretical options available at this time, while also complicating for readers what has become known as institutional critique.

Note: This is a text-only version of the article. To access the article as published, click on the tandfonline.com link.

October 143, Mar 2013

Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 ... more Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 cm) is an unprecedented painting in which the thin vertical painted stripe is only slightly narrower than the canvas itself. The painting is context dependent and, given its extreme dimensions and the limitations of visual perception, The Wild cannot do otherwise than to produce a perceptually heightened surround as much as it attracts attention to itself. The essay considers the perceptual problems arising from the unusual dimensions of the work, and the related consequences of framing, or not framing, The Wild.

Art History 34, no. 1, Feb 2011

Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie each contributed to a page of Picabia’s Dadaist magazine... more Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie each contributed to a page of Picabia’s Dadaist magazine 391, of 1924. Picabia contributed a drawing, Satie a polemical writing, and Man Ray a seemingly abstract poem. Metamorphosis and interpretative simultaneity are both subjects and devices of this three-part collaborative effort. The page involves multiple levels of deliberate codification involving interrelated references to the Arensberg Circle, Satie’s ballet Mercure, Renaissance art of Raphael and Albrecht Dürer, the Morse code, as well as Dadaist and Futurist poetics. The mutative quality of possible interpretations suggests that the page is meant to be understood through multiple, even divergent and simultaneous readings. The resulting interpretative flux recalls Picabia’s own multi-layered approach to painting, which may serve as a model for understanding the operations of this 391 page.

Public 42, Sep 2010

This article includes a selection from, and commentary on, a photographic project by David M.C. M... more This article includes a selection from, and commentary on, a photographic project by David M.C. Miller that considers photographs as mnemonic tools in the struggle against forgetting, particularly as related to sites linked to the Holocaust. The essay touches on a theoretical debate concerning the representation of the Holocaust, and makes frequent references to the writing of Paul Ricoeur.

Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris , 2004

This essay deals with the “Information” exhibition of 1970 at MoMA, one of the more significant e... more This essay deals with the “Information” exhibition of 1970 at MoMA, one of the more significant exhibitions of Conceptual and related art of the period. The role of the curator as a type of artist is discussed, as is the importance of Marshall McLuhan’s writing to the exhibition.

Public 26, 2003

This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist... more This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist Bernar Venet, one of the original practitioners of Conceptual art.

Parachute 106, Apr 2002

This essay deals with some of the earliest artists to investigate the artistic possibilities of b... more This essay deals with some of the earliest artists to investigate the artistic possibilities of business and economic activities or organizations.

Canadian journal of history, Sep 1, 2007

Canadian Journal of History, 2007

This collection of essays deals with the issues that animated Conceptual art in the Anglophone wo... more This collection of essays deals with the issues that animated Conceptual art in the Anglophone world. It offers readers a wealth of new research on the earliest international exhibitions of Conceptual art, new interpretation of some of its most important practitioners, and a reconsideration of ...

Public, Jan 5, 2002

This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist... more This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist Bernar Venet, one of the original practitioners of Conceptual art.

Art Journal, 2014

Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when consideri... more Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when considering North American art of the late 1960s and early 70s whose aim (rather than being the sole object of attention itself) is to direct attention to seldom noticed phenomena, veiled areas of the artworld, and what McLuhan refers to as the ground rules of society, “a kind of overall enveloping force”. Readers may recognize in the counter-environment the later theoretical ideas and activities of “institutional critique,” a term that is too seldom considered either as a technique or in relation to the complex intellectual lineage that it draws upon. I will provide a partial historical and theoretical ancestry for McLuhan’s counter-environment and will suggest its utility for understanding works of some North American artists of the period, including Dan Graham, John Cage, Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Richard Serra, in order to draw attention to the diversity of work that can be informed by reference to the counter-environment. Doing so may additionally assist in broadening our understanding of the theoretical options available at this time, while also complicating for readers what has become known as institutional critique. Note: This is a text-only version of the article. To access the article as published, click on the tandfonline.com link.

October, 2013

Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 ... more Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 cm) is an unprecedented painting in which the thin vertical painted stripe is only slightly narrower than the canvas itself. The painting is context dependent and, given its extreme dimensions and the limitations of visual perception, The Wild cannot do otherwise than to produce a perceptually heightened surround as much as it attracts attention to itself. The essay considers the perceptual problems arising from the unusual dimensions of the work, and the related consequences of framing, or not framing, The Wild.

Imaginations Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies/revue d études interculturelle de l image

The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under... more The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author's original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions.

Imaginations, 2017

Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the counterenvironment is within a larger tradition of defamiliariza... more Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the counterenvironment is within a larger tradition of defamiliarization that emerges in Romanticism and can be further traced through the writings of Henri Bergson, English literary modernism, Russian formalist ostranenie, Brechtian estrangement, and more recent institutional critique.
Among related Romantic writings, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay “A Defence of Poetry” of 1821 clearly anticipates later theories that both repeat and continue to develop fundamental notions of defamiliarization. Bergson’s writings on the comic revive Romantic ideas when he states that the object of the arts is “to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.” English modernists such as T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, and their contemporaries drew on Bergson and were major sources for McLuhan’s counterenvironment. Russian formalist and English modernist defamiliarization share roots in Romanticism and Bergson, which account for their sometimes-parallel perspectives. McLuhan had some limited exposure to Russian formalism by way of Constructivist cinema as well as the art and writings of László Moholy-Nagy. Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie is mistakenly understood by some later writers to be at the origin of defamiliarization, although it was a point of departure for Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect.” McLuhan began using the term “counterenvironment” not long before some artists, who were aware of McLuhan’s writing on the subject, started to direct the audience’s aestheticized attention to the situation’s contextual framework rather than to discrete objects alone. Like the counterenvironment, later institutional critique proposed a Gestalt reversal of attention by turning the environmental ground to figure.
McLuhan’s theory of the counterenvironment, and the variations of defamiliarization more generally, are historically specific while they also partake in transformative historical processes that involve a fusion of communication, change, continuity, and repetition.

Art Journal, 2014

Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when consideri... more Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “counter-environment” has great explanatory value when considering North American art of the late 1960s and early 70s whose aim (rather than being the sole object of attention itself) is to direct attention to seldom noticed phenomena, veiled areas of the artworld, and what McLuhan refers to as the ground rules of society, “a kind of overall enveloping force”. Readers may recognize in the counter-environment the later theoretical ideas and activities of “institutional critique,” a term that is too seldom considered either as a technique or in relation to the complex intellectual lineage that it draws upon. I will provide a partial historical and theoretical ancestry for McLuhan’s counter-environment and will suggest its utility for understanding works of some North American artists of the period, including Dan Graham, John Cage, Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Richard Serra, in order to draw attention to the diversity of work that can be informed by reference to the counter-environment. Doing so may additionally assist in broadening our understanding of the theoretical options available at this time, while also complicating for readers what has become known as institutional critique.

Note: This is a text-only version of the article. To access the article as published, click on the tandfonline.com link.

October 143, Mar 2013

Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 ... more Barnett Newman’s narrow, vertical canvas of 1950 entitled The Wild (with dimensions of 243 x 4.1 cm) is an unprecedented painting in which the thin vertical painted stripe is only slightly narrower than the canvas itself. The painting is context dependent and, given its extreme dimensions and the limitations of visual perception, The Wild cannot do otherwise than to produce a perceptually heightened surround as much as it attracts attention to itself. The essay considers the perceptual problems arising from the unusual dimensions of the work, and the related consequences of framing, or not framing, The Wild.

Art History 34, no. 1, Feb 2011

Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie each contributed to a page of Picabia’s Dadaist magazine... more Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Erik Satie each contributed to a page of Picabia’s Dadaist magazine 391, of 1924. Picabia contributed a drawing, Satie a polemical writing, and Man Ray a seemingly abstract poem. Metamorphosis and interpretative simultaneity are both subjects and devices of this three-part collaborative effort. The page involves multiple levels of deliberate codification involving interrelated references to the Arensberg Circle, Satie’s ballet Mercure, Renaissance art of Raphael and Albrecht Dürer, the Morse code, as well as Dadaist and Futurist poetics. The mutative quality of possible interpretations suggests that the page is meant to be understood through multiple, even divergent and simultaneous readings. The resulting interpretative flux recalls Picabia’s own multi-layered approach to painting, which may serve as a model for understanding the operations of this 391 page.

Public 42, Sep 2010

This article includes a selection from, and commentary on, a photographic project by David M.C. M... more This article includes a selection from, and commentary on, a photographic project by David M.C. Miller that considers photographs as mnemonic tools in the struggle against forgetting, particularly as related to sites linked to the Holocaust. The essay touches on a theoretical debate concerning the representation of the Holocaust, and makes frequent references to the writing of Paul Ricoeur.

Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris , 2004

This essay deals with the “Information” exhibition of 1970 at MoMA, one of the more significant e... more This essay deals with the “Information” exhibition of 1970 at MoMA, one of the more significant exhibitions of Conceptual and related art of the period. The role of the curator as a type of artist is discussed, as is the importance of Marshall McLuhan’s writing to the exhibition.

Public 26, 2003

This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist... more This article includes a selection of, and commentary on, the experimental poetry of French artist Bernar Venet, one of the original practitioners of Conceptual art.

Parachute 106, Apr 2002

This essay deals with some of the earliest artists to investigate the artistic possibilities of b... more This essay deals with some of the earliest artists to investigate the artistic possibilities of business and economic activities or organizations.