Output details

Cast Contemporaries: artists respond to the completion of the Cast Collection Project at Edinburgh College of Art

Does art school collection-holding impact upon emerging art practices? As Honorary Research Fellow at Edinburgh University, Dorsett spent 2012 working collaboratively with Stewart (ECA’s Cast Collection curator) and 22 exhibitors (as disparate as Borland and Stoddart) to redefine the status of ECA’s plaster casts of Graeco-Roman sculptures and anatomical specimens. They proposed that this art school collection (arguably the most important in the UK) could be, if curatorialy reimagined, a catalyst for experimentation by contemporary artists. <http://castcontemporaries.weebly.com/>

Dorsett’s paper on experimental artist-museum dialogues (Art Schools: Inventions, Invective and Radical Possibilities, UCL, 2010) led, through Stewart, to an invitation to curate this output – a 2012 Edinburgh Festival exhibition marking the Lottery-funded restoration of ECA’s casts. Frederiksen & Marchand (2010), with Ashmolean and V&A conferences (2007, 2010), stimulated historical reappraisals of conserving and displaying casts. Dorsett (with Creative Scotland funding) tested this scholarship as a practice-oriented imperative. His Rainer-influenced over-drawings on same-size photographs of vandalised casts contrasted the battle between photographic and cast reproductions in Victorian museums (Bann’s keynote for Dorsett’s session ‘Legacies, Uses, Perceptions’, ECA conference, <http://www.eca.ac.uk/casts/Cast%20Collection%20International%20Conference%202011.pdf>) with contemporary anxieties about Neo-Classicism (Cast Contemporaries catalogue, Hare and Stewart essays). Dorsett’s own catalogue text explored the role of cast-derived artworks in engendering a ‘post-contemporary’ aesthetic within present-day art theory and practice.

Peer-reviewed extensions of this output include Dorsett’s paper on the fate of art school anatomical casts for his Royal Photographic Society Combined Royal Colleges Lecture (Royal College of Physicians, 2012). Dorsett also compared collecting cast objects to the archiving of recorded sound (both ‘molded’ reproductions) in 'Synaesthetic Presences: new sights from old sounds', British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference, 'Making Sound Objects: Cultures of Hearing, Creating and Circulation' <http://makingsoundobjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/dorsett-chris-2/>