To commemorate the life and work of Joseph Beuys, the Ruskin School of Art established a decade-long series of lectures and talks by speakers with highly personal viewpoints, which explored wide-ranging issues of importance to visual artists and their allies.

2004 The Experience of Performance

For of Britain’s leading performance artists talk about the sources of their work. Taking part were Brian Catling, Lucy Kimbell, Hayley Newman and Gary Stevens. The event was chaired by Lois Keidan, Director of the Live Art Development Agency.

2003 A Place For Art

The directors of three major institutions discussed their visions for working with artists in times of structural and professional change. Taking part were Eddie Berg (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool), Alan Haydon (De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea) and Jenni Lomax (Camden Arts Centre, London). The event was chaired by Andrew Nairne, Director of Modern Art Oxford.

2002 Overseas Interests

‘I do not want to carry art into politics, but to make politics into art’: so said Joseph Beuys. Making politics into art is also the challenge confronting the filmmaker seeking to interpret the world through the medium of non-fiction. In these lectures, illustrated with extracts from his films, Christopher Mitchell reflected on the making of documentaries about foreign affairs. As globalising trends intensify and nations become ever more interdependent, the need to understand the world is more pressing than ever. Yet British broadcasters are set on an apparently unstoppable drive to parochialism: on every channel foreign stories are being pushed out of primetime or off the schedule altogether. In such unpropitious times, what are the possibilities for making films that don’t follow the news agenda and avoid conventional modes of reportage?

Christopher Mitchell is an award-winning writer, producer and director of television documentaries, with a particular interest in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East. He has made films for BBC Television, ITV and Channel 4, for such series as Inside Story, Secret History, Omnibus, Dispatches and Correspondent. His films range across the fields of culture, history, politics and current affairs and have been shown all over the world.

2001 Imagining Germany

Three spoken texts by Deborah Levy that explored how ideas that live in the mind translate into ideas that live in the world.

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays highly acclaimed for their intellectual rigour and visual imagination. These texts are published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen). Her novels include Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, Billy and Girl (Bloomsbury) and The Unloved (Vintage). She has always written across a number of art forms and books like Diary of a Steak (Book Works) and An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell (Vintage) have inspired and been inspired by the work of interdisciplinary artists. She was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge between 1989 and 1991.

2000 New Media Culture: We are the Ghosts in the Machine

As a species, we have lovingly embraced computers as if we had been waiting for thousands of years for their arrival. In fact, Terry Braun believes that we have, and that during that time we have created a set of expectations that are currently determining how we use and abuse information and communications technology. In these talks, he wanted to look at those expectations and tried to discover how they were formed, found examples of creative work that this love affair with computers has spawned, and explored the social and cultural implications of these findings for the future.

Formerly Director of Illuminations Interactive and now Director of Braunarts, Terry Braun is an award-winning television producer and director and multimedia designer with a history of participation in and encouragement of interdisciplinary collaboration as an artist, producer and commissioner. He works as a senior consultant on multimedia and information and communications technology for a range of clients. He was Chairman of the Arts Council of England’s Combined Arts Projects Fund, the committee that was particularly concerned with the relationship between new technology and the arts, and was a member of the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Committee. He also sat on the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s Creative Industries Panel.

1999 What is Good Painting: Who Knows?

A lecture by Dore Ashton that enquired into the presence and absence of quality in painting.

Dore Ashton is Professor of Art History at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and is one of the most respected writers on modernism and other subjects. Her book list includes a number of established classics including Fragonard in the Universe of Painting, The Sculpture of Pol Bury, Richard Lindner, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, Yes, but…: A Critical Biography of Philip Guston, American Art since 1945, Rosa Bonheur: A Life and a Legend, About Rothko, A Joseph Cornell Album, Rauschenberg’s Dante and Twentieth-Century Artists on Art.

1998 From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality

A lecture by Jeffrey Shaw that looked at the creative use of digital media in the fields of virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualisation, navigable cinematic systems and interactive narrative.

Jeffrey Shaw has pioneered the use of interactivity and virtuality in his many art installations. His works have been exhibited worldwide at major museums and festivals. For many years he was living in Amsterdam where he co-founded the Evenstructure Research Group. He was also the Director of the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, a unique research and production facility where artists and scientists are working together and developing profound artistic applications of the new media technologies.

1997 Art and Audiences

A series of lectures that explored the relationships between contemporary art and its publics by internationally-renowned academics, artists, gallery professionals and writers from Britain, France, Australia and the United States of America, including Lewis Biggs, Tania Kovats, Roberta Lord, Elizabeth A Macgregor, Chris Nash, Alfred Pacquement, Pierre Schneider, Gray Watson and Alison Wilding.

1996 Art and Science

A series of lectures that addressed the interface between art and science by internationally renowned artists, academics and writers from Britain, Europe and North America, including Martha Fleming, Richard Gregory, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Martin Kemp, Arthur Miller, Mark Pauline and Johan Pijnappel.

1995 An Art Audit

A series of lectures on the state of contemporary art in Britain, Europe and the United States of America by internationally renowned artists, curators and writers, including Lieven van den Abeele, Marina Abramovic, Richard Cork, Sean Scully, Robert Storr and Richard Wentworth.

Stuart Morgan inaugurated the series with a lecture on the Rough Magic of Joseph Beuys, which was delivered at the British Academy in London on Friday 3 March 1995. William Furlong complemented this twelve months later with Strategic Interventions, a presentation of the recordings he made with Joseph Beuys for Audio Arts between 1974 and 1985, which was delivered at the Royal Society in London on Thursday 26 April 1996.

Organised by the Ruskin School of Art in association with the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Department of Chemistry, Educational Technology Resources Centre and Taylor Institution at the University of Oxford, St Edmund Hall, Oxford, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, DA2 Digital Arts Development Agency, Bristol, Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, The National Gallery, London and Tate Gallery, London and supported by funding from Arts Council England, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Southern Arts.