Jennifer Lucy Allanconcertresearch presentationAgendaArtistic activitiesJennifer Lucy Allan is a writer, researcher and broadcaster. She has acquired a PhD at CRiSAP (UAL) on the social and cultural history of the foghorn, which became the foundation of her first book, The Foghorn’s Lament (White Rabbit Books, 2021). She is also a presenter of BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, and is a freelance music journalist specialising in underground and experimental music. Previously she was online editor for The Wire, and now freelances for The Wire, The Quietus, The Guardian and others. She co-runs the record labels Arc Light Editions and Good Energy, and is a member of Laura Cannell’s Modern Ritual Collective, and the Cafe OTO Experimental Choir. She has recently published her second book, Clay: A Human History (Pegasus Books, 2024), and has been working on an essay on the soundtracks in the films of Sogo Ishii (forthcoming).
Rudolf Arnheim has shown that the content of a modern art work (what it is about) is largely based on its specific formal properties (composition, material, color use, etc.), i.e. not on what is represented but how it is represented. I want to examine if this thesis is also valid for contemporary art. This is not so obvious as contemporary art often has a conceptual dimension that is not immediately detectable in the formal aspects of the work.
