Tomás Harris Lectures 2018

Tuesday 23 October, 6pm - Being Together
Thursday 25 October, 6pm - Being Apart

These lectures explore the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s fraught relation to the practice of art history. They take as a starting point Marcel Proust’s recognition that an experience of dislocation lay at the heart of Ruskin’s project. For at its best, Proust realized, Ruskin’s thought was always centred on ‘an object other than itself’ and therefore ‘materialized in space… incarnated in bodies of sculpted marble, in snowy mountains, in painted countenances.’ ‘One must seek it where it is,’ Proust wrote, ‘scattered here and there over the surface of the earth.’ The lectures thus seek to investigate Ruskin’s attachments to key sites and artefacts, and to disinter the forms of history he found there.