Mark A Cheetham
I am a settler art historian who has written books and articles on abstract art, the reception of Immanuel Kant’s thinking in the visual arts and the discipline of art history, on art historical methodology, and on contemporary art. The historiography and methodology of art history and the field of Visual Culture Studies are ongoing research interests, as is contemporary art in Canada and abroad, from both curatorial and academic perspectives. My current work focuses on Polar voyaging in the 19th century, ecoart, GeoAesthetics, and the uses of analogy in art history. I am active as a curator of historical & contemporary art.
I am the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Fellowship, a University of Toronto Connaught Research Fellowship and Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowship in the Humanities, several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grants, the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching (University of Western Ontario, 1998), and the Northrop Frye Award for teaching (University of Toronto, 2006). In 2006, I received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association of America for “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now,” and in 2008, the Curatorial Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, for “The Transformative Abstraction of Robert Houle,” in Robert Houle: Troubling Abstraction. Exh. Cat. McMaster University Art Gallery, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), 2007. My co-curated exhibition Jack Chambers: The Light From the Darkness / Silver Paintings and Film Work was awarded “Exhibition of the Year” (a juried prize) by the Ontario Assoc. of Art Galleries, 2011.
I was the principal investigator on a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant titled CACHET (Canadian Art Commons for History of Art Education and Training), 2013-17.
On Research Leave, July 2024 -
Supervisors: William Vaughan (UCL)
I am the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Fellowship, a University of Toronto Connaught Research Fellowship and Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowship in the Humanities, several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grants, the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching (University of Western Ontario, 1998), and the Northrop Frye Award for teaching (University of Toronto, 2006). In 2006, I received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association of America for “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now,” and in 2008, the Curatorial Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, for “The Transformative Abstraction of Robert Houle,” in Robert Houle: Troubling Abstraction. Exh. Cat. McMaster University Art Gallery, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), 2007. My co-curated exhibition Jack Chambers: The Light From the Darkness / Silver Paintings and Film Work was awarded “Exhibition of the Year” (a juried prize) by the Ontario Assoc. of Art Galleries, 2011.
I was the principal investigator on a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant titled CACHET (Canadian Art Commons for History of Art Education and Training), 2013-17.
On Research Leave, July 2024 -
Supervisors: William Vaughan (UCL)
less
InterestsView All (64)
Uploads
Books by Mark A Cheetham
Through eight thematic case studies that illuminate what eco art means in practice, reception, and history, Cheetham places the form in a longer and broader art-historical context. He considers a wide range of media—from painting, sculpture, and photography to artists’ films, video, sound work, animation, and installation—and analyzes the work of internationally prominent artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Mark Dion, and Robert Smithson. In doing so, Cheetham reveals eco art to be a dynamic extension of a long tradition of landscape depiction in the West that boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and our collective and individual responsibility to the planet.
An ambitious intervention into eco-criticism and the environmental humanities, this volume provides original ways to understand the issues and practices of eco art in the Anthropocene. Art historians, humanities scholars, and lay readers interested in contemporary art and the environment will find Cheetham’s work valuable and invigorating.
Mark A. Cheetham also explores how the 'Englishing' of art theory–which came about despite the longstanding occlusion of the intellectual and theoretical in British culture–did not take place or have effects exclusively in Britain. Theory has always travelled with art and vice versa. Using the frequently resurgent discourse of cosmopolitanism as a frame for his discourse, Cheetham asks whether English traditions of artwriting have been judged inappropriately according to imported criteria of what theory is and does. This book demonstrates that artwriting in the English tradition has not been sufficiently studied, and that 'English Art Theory' is not an oxymoron. Such concerns resonate today beyond academe and the art world in the many heated discussions of resurgent Englishness.
Contents: Introduction: Artwriting and national identity (or, no theory please, we're English); Englishness, foreignness, and Empire in British artwriting, c. 1700–1900; Indigenes, imports, and exports: Englishness in artwriting from modernism to the 21st century; Bibliography; Index.
A significant if difficult to read art theorist, Chambers believed that distinctions needed to be made among types of realism and because he felt his own approach was unique. He drew on examples from his own work, including 401 Towards London No. 1 and Sunday Morning No. 2, both begun in 1968 though completed, as the essay was, in 1969, after Chambers learned that he had leukemia. Perceptual realism was for Chambers a new type of realism, one that went to the essence of matter through light and material.
Examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance, and cure provides the opportunity to rethink abstraction’s appearances within and beyond its traditional frames of reference. The book links in new ways artists whose work extends and complicates the traditions of abstract art, including Yves Klein, and Taras Polataiko.""
Articles by Mark A Cheetham
The Arctic fascinated Londoners in the nineteenth century in panoramas, paintings and sculptures, voyage narratives and—tragically—transplanted Inuit. What has not been fully examined are the little-known amateur ‘snow sculptures’ of Britannia and other imperial figures made on a monumental scale in the Arctic in the early 1850s, when hundreds of sailors were searching for the lost 1845 Franklin expedition. Comparable with this crossing in sculpture is the amalgamation in one Parliamentary chart of an anonymous Inuk’s drawing of Franklin’s ships in the ice with a rendering of the area approved by the Admiralty. While these chiasmic interactions map a circuit of exchange, they also lack a centre. The most conspicuous absence in the Arctic was John Franklin, his crew and his two recently-recovered ships. In England, what was never ‘fixed’ was the idea of the Arctic.
Art, 1977-1990 takes on the different histories in the work of Canadian
artists within a practice that is now identified as appropriation art. This
project brings together the scholarhsip of numerous writers, artists and
curators who speak about the issues and ideas that framed much of
the work and discussions happening in Canada in the period from late
1970s up to the early 1990s, pointing out many striking differences
between the American practice of appropriation and appropriation as
practiced in Canadian art, especially in Toronto. This history has never
been traced in a book or represented by a comprehensive exhibition.
With this edited volume Julian Jason Haladyn and I correct this
oversight by writing a history replete with images, interviews with
the artists and essays that define a specific practice of appropriation
that developed in Canada during this period – what Haladyn will call
Canadian Appropriation art.
This two-part NiCHE series presents interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural, social, and environmental dynamics across Indigenous communities and settler populations in the circumpolar north, including Alaska, Canada, Greenland, the Nordic countries, and Russia. The research presented in this series is a collaboration with a Jackman Humanities Institute (University of Toronto) Working Group on the same themes. Now in its second year, this forum brings together 20 international researchers at all career stages to develop interdisciplinary perspectives on Indigenous, environmental, and settler pasts, presents, and futures around the circumpolar north and to examine the complex visual and textual cultures of this region. Some posts in this series are from members of this group; we have also extended the conversation through many other voices.
John Guille Millais reported in his 1899 biography of his famous father, John Everett Millais, that The North-West Passage (1874) was “perhaps the most popular of all Millais’ paintings at the time”. The picture’s adoptive subtitle—“It might be done, and England should to do it”, purportedly uttered by the aged sailor in the painting—captured the patriotic zeal for the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876, rather than the past glories (and tragedies) of the British quest to traverse the Northwest Passage. “It” in this motto looks ahead to the planting of the British flag at the North Pole and to the treatment of the Arctic in contemporary art. Looking closely at this complex painting and its surrounding discourses in the Victorian period and in related works from our own time, I argue that The North-West Passage was and remains a “metapicture” that distilled speculation on Arctic voyaging from the Anglosphere in the 1870s and does so again today.
Through eight thematic case studies that illuminate what eco art means in practice, reception, and history, Cheetham places the form in a longer and broader art-historical context. He considers a wide range of media—from painting, sculpture, and photography to artists’ films, video, sound work, animation, and installation—and analyzes the work of internationally prominent artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Mark Dion, and Robert Smithson. In doing so, Cheetham reveals eco art to be a dynamic extension of a long tradition of landscape depiction in the West that boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and our collective and individual responsibility to the planet.
An ambitious intervention into eco-criticism and the environmental humanities, this volume provides original ways to understand the issues and practices of eco art in the Anthropocene. Art historians, humanities scholars, and lay readers interested in contemporary art and the environment will find Cheetham’s work valuable and invigorating.
Mark A. Cheetham also explores how the 'Englishing' of art theory–which came about despite the longstanding occlusion of the intellectual and theoretical in British culture–did not take place or have effects exclusively in Britain. Theory has always travelled with art and vice versa. Using the frequently resurgent discourse of cosmopolitanism as a frame for his discourse, Cheetham asks whether English traditions of artwriting have been judged inappropriately according to imported criteria of what theory is and does. This book demonstrates that artwriting in the English tradition has not been sufficiently studied, and that 'English Art Theory' is not an oxymoron. Such concerns resonate today beyond academe and the art world in the many heated discussions of resurgent Englishness.
Contents: Introduction: Artwriting and national identity (or, no theory please, we're English); Englishness, foreignness, and Empire in British artwriting, c. 1700–1900; Indigenes, imports, and exports: Englishness in artwriting from modernism to the 21st century; Bibliography; Index.
A significant if difficult to read art theorist, Chambers believed that distinctions needed to be made among types of realism and because he felt his own approach was unique. He drew on examples from his own work, including 401 Towards London No. 1 and Sunday Morning No. 2, both begun in 1968 though completed, as the essay was, in 1969, after Chambers learned that he had leukemia. Perceptual realism was for Chambers a new type of realism, one that went to the essence of matter through light and material.
Examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance, and cure provides the opportunity to rethink abstraction’s appearances within and beyond its traditional frames of reference. The book links in new ways artists whose work extends and complicates the traditions of abstract art, including Yves Klein, and Taras Polataiko.""
The Arctic fascinated Londoners in the nineteenth century in panoramas, paintings and sculptures, voyage narratives and—tragically—transplanted Inuit. What has not been fully examined are the little-known amateur ‘snow sculptures’ of Britannia and other imperial figures made on a monumental scale in the Arctic in the early 1850s, when hundreds of sailors were searching for the lost 1845 Franklin expedition. Comparable with this crossing in sculpture is the amalgamation in one Parliamentary chart of an anonymous Inuk’s drawing of Franklin’s ships in the ice with a rendering of the area approved by the Admiralty. While these chiasmic interactions map a circuit of exchange, they also lack a centre. The most conspicuous absence in the Arctic was John Franklin, his crew and his two recently-recovered ships. In England, what was never ‘fixed’ was the idea of the Arctic.
Art, 1977-1990 takes on the different histories in the work of Canadian
artists within a practice that is now identified as appropriation art. This
project brings together the scholarhsip of numerous writers, artists and
curators who speak about the issues and ideas that framed much of
the work and discussions happening in Canada in the period from late
1970s up to the early 1990s, pointing out many striking differences
between the American practice of appropriation and appropriation as
practiced in Canadian art, especially in Toronto. This history has never
been traced in a book or represented by a comprehensive exhibition.
With this edited volume Julian Jason Haladyn and I correct this
oversight by writing a history replete with images, interviews with
the artists and essays that define a specific practice of appropriation
that developed in Canada during this period – what Haladyn will call
Canadian Appropriation art.
This two-part NiCHE series presents interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural, social, and environmental dynamics across Indigenous communities and settler populations in the circumpolar north, including Alaska, Canada, Greenland, the Nordic countries, and Russia. The research presented in this series is a collaboration with a Jackman Humanities Institute (University of Toronto) Working Group on the same themes. Now in its second year, this forum brings together 20 international researchers at all career stages to develop interdisciplinary perspectives on Indigenous, environmental, and settler pasts, presents, and futures around the circumpolar north and to examine the complex visual and textual cultures of this region. Some posts in this series are from members of this group; we have also extended the conversation through many other voices.
John Guille Millais reported in his 1899 biography of his famous father, John Everett Millais, that The North-West Passage (1874) was “perhaps the most popular of all Millais’ paintings at the time”. The picture’s adoptive subtitle—“It might be done, and England should to do it”, purportedly uttered by the aged sailor in the painting—captured the patriotic zeal for the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876, rather than the past glories (and tragedies) of the British quest to traverse the Northwest Passage. “It” in this motto looks ahead to the planting of the British flag at the North Pole and to the treatment of the Arctic in contemporary art. Looking closely at this complex painting and its surrounding discourses in the Victorian period and in related works from our own time, I argue that The North-West Passage was and remains a “metapicture” that distilled speculation on Arctic voyaging from the Anglosphere in the 1870s and does so again today.
planetary norms of the Holocene into today’s accelerating changes in the atmosphere, land, and oceans. Climate
scientists agree that the accumulating carbon-producing activities of some human beings and their technologies have
occurred over centuries but have become increasingly rapid and detrimental since the so-called “Great Acceleration,” which
began c. 1945 with the testing and use of atomic weapons and a stupefying increase in many other impactful metrics. Second,
artists, curators, and art historians have focused increasingly in recent years on changing phenomena in the environment
and responses to them, creating noticeably more artworks, exhibitions, and scholarly analyses of the much-discussed crisis
of global climate disruption and its increasingly tragic ramifications. How might we bring climate issues into the ambit of
art and Art History? Both “ecological art” and “eco art history” embrace a range of practices — contemporary and historical
— that investigate the environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships between human and nonhuman animals
as well as inanimate materials.
Static, (Journal of The London Consortium), Issue 08 – “General,” 2009: 1-9.
of the complex, generative interplay of word and image. Our analysis details the intricate formal interweaving of poem and visual artwork, the inspirations and reference points for both artforms – including the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Anna
Freud, Marcel Proust, and especially earth artist Robert Smithson’s essays. Our reading of Horn’s and Carson’s works seeks to understand their extended conception of “writing” and “drawing,” the vagaries of gender, and the ecology of water.
Abstract: One of the most prominent philosophical legacies in the historiography of art history is Erwin Panofsky’s debt to Immanuel Kant. Structurally and thematically, Panofsky imports philosophy, embodied by Kant, into the body of the younger discipline. I will argue that it is Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism governs the relationships between philosophy and art history for Panofsky. What I call "theory reception” – how Panofsky received Kant and how art history in the U.S.A. received Panofsky, however much he may have downplayed the theoretical aspects of his later work - was in part determined, as it often is, by political factors. I will also ask what would it mean for art history to be cosmopolitan now? To approach these questions, we need to move away from both art history and philosophy to study the re-engagement with the term cosmopolitan in other contemporary discourses.
LINK: https://www.fondationgrantham.org/en/home
Andreas Rutkauskas began his extensive ‘After the Fire’ project in 2017, the first of two consecutive record setting forest fire seasons in western Canada. He made his large format, punctilious photographs in specific areas prone to wildfire, primarily in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. Precise and meditative, the images encourage viewers’ awareness of the short- and longer-term impacts of wildfires. Avoiding the sensationalism of the news cycle – and thus suspending our all too human tendencies to expect the spectacular and to tune out, even from the massive destruction of the Fort McMurray fires in 2016, for example – Rutkauskas’s photographs are uniquely powerful in their examination of regeneration after conflagration.
Guest Curator: Mark A. Cheetham
McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, ON CANADA
19 August – 2 December, 2017
Struck by Likening explores commonplace declarations such as “Tom Thomson is the Van Gogh of Canada” and Norval Morrisseau is “the Picasso of the North.” We may call these familiar comparisons “likenings.” Innocent though they might seem, we need to take likenings seriously. They occur with such frequency as to become largely unheard and invisible. They structure not only what we say about art, but literally how we see it. Likenings can trigger ‘ah-ha’ moments when we are ‘struck by likening’ in the sense of having an insight or they can commit us to dubious cultural assumptions.
Likening is a form of analogy, a process by which a connection is asserted between two distinct elements. Examples abound in pop culture (“Prabhu Deva [is] the Michael Jackson of India”), politics (“Nelson Mandela: The Lincoln of Africa”), science (Ernest Rutherford’s analogy between the atom and solar system), and the law, which argues from analogous precedents. Analogy is fundamental to the way we make sense of the world. Struck by Likening interrogates how we construct our views on artists, their works, and art history through analogy.
The exhibition has five viewing stations, each exploring the issues raised by likening. Questions of national aspiration, genius, gender, anachronism, inter-media comparison, humour, and cultural appropriation are brought into focus. Visitors will see likenings that seem right and lend insight and those that reinforce stereotypes. When comparing the comparisons on exhibit, are you inclined to accept or to resist likenings?
Works for Struck by Likening are drawn from the historical, modern and contemporary collection of the MMA, and loans from the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Museum London and the Corkin Gallery, Toronto. They include works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jack Chambers, George Grosz, William Hogarth, William Kurelek, Wifredo Lam, David Lucas, Norval Morrisseau, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gerhard Richter, Tom Thomson, Harold Town, Homer Watson, and Edward Weston.
An illustrated exhibition guide is available.
https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2018/12/19/well-grounded/
BROOKLYN RAIL:
https://brooklynrail.org/2018/06/art_books/Landscape-into-Eco-Art-Articulations-of-Nature-Since-the-60s-Penn-State-University-Press-2018
The Goose:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1580&context=thegoose
LINK:
http://momus.ca/branding-the-anthropocene-canadas-art-institutions-privilege-the-artificial/