Dom Sylvester Houédard: Tantric Poetries
- Submitting institution
-
Norwich University of the Arts
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- NUA-NS-01
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Lisson Gallery London
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- March
- Year of first exhibition
- 2020
- URL
-
https://nua.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/17339
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
C - Pattern and Chaos
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Dom Sylvester Houédard: tantric poetries was the first Lisson Gallery show of the artist and Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-1992) in London for fifty years. In 2019 Nicola Simpson was invited by Nicholas Logsdail to curate the show from works held in the Lisson Gallery archives. She was the first scholar to research the Houédard papers held in the gallery archives. Houédard (dsh) was one of the first artists that the Lisson Gallery represented; he had two solo shows there in 1967 and
participated in three group shows between 1967 -70.
The exhibition was a development of Simpson’s research on Houédard’s work, his role in the transplantation of Buddhisms in transnational post-war avant-garde art and her curatorial practice which engages with an interpretative conceptual framework based on Mahayana Buddhist epistemology, specifically Tibetan Vajrayana Tantric Buddhism and its associated performance rituals. As such, it was the first exhibition to present the Houédard’s work as engaging directly with Tantric Buddhism.
Over a series of visits to the archives, Simpson selected 100 typestracts and 50 laminatepoems from the extensive collection of Houédard’s poemobjects, typestracts, notebooks and miscellany. Some works selected had remained unexhibited for fifty years, since Houédard’s 1970 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 'dsh: visual poetries'. However, many of the typestracts and laminates that Simpson chose had never been seen by the public before.
The exhibition opened on 11th March 2020 but closed due to the imposed Covid-19 restrictions. It then moved online as a virtual exhibition and Simpson filmed a curator’s tour to accompany this.
Simpson was scheduled to deliver a conference paper, focused on the curation of the laminate poems in the exhibition, at ‘Cutting Edge: Collage in Britain, 1945 to Now’, Tate Britain, on 28 March 2020. The conference was postponed due to Covid-19 restrictions.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
