Lecture by John C. Welchman. Mountains and the Marine: Visual Metaphor in the Work of Cosima von Bonin

Few artists have packed such an extraordinary range of both clear and covert references to art movements and other artists or to particular locations and intermittently specific objects into the sequencing of their works. Focusing on the “marine core” of Cosima von Bonin’s art this lecture will examine how metaphorical meanings are found, produced and relayed in the work of the artist.

John C. Welchman is Professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego and co-director of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. His books include Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale, 1997) and Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Routledge, 2001); he is co-author of the Dada and Surrealist Word Image (MIT Press, 1987) and of Mike Kelley in the Phaidon Contemporary Artists series (1999); and editor of Rethinking Borders (Minnesota UP/Routledge, 1996). XX to XXI: Essays on European Art will be published by Akal, Madrid in Spanish, in 2012. Welchman is founder and chair of the Southern California Consortium of Art Schools and editor of its publication series for JRP|Ringier: Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the 90s to Now (2005); Institutional Critique and After (2006); The Aesthetics of Risk (2008); Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (2010); and, forthcoming, Public Culture in the Visual Sphere. He editor of the collected writings of Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, was published with MIT Press in 2003;, Minor Histories, also, with MIT, arrived Spring 2004; and the third Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, 1988-2004 with JRP|Ringier, Zurich in 2005. His most recent book is On the Beyond: A Conversation between Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and John C Welchman, ed. John. Welchman, [Kunst und Architektur im Gespraech/Art and Architecture in Discussion] (Vienna and New York: SpringerWienNewYork, 2011).