John Ruskin in the TV series "Desperate Romantics"
As an art critic, John Ruskin’s work is often positioned in terms of the visual. Ruskin is always looking, seeing, and recording. However, media depictions of Ruskin do not focus only the visual, but rather examine the larger ethics of the sensory, what different senses are mentioned, depicted, and used, which often suggests a flawed representation of him and his work. Beginning with a few nineteenth century visual caricatures of Ruskin, Gagné will explore the depiction of Ruskin in the television series Desperate Romantics (2009), movies Mr. Turner (2014) and Effie Gray (2014), as well as popular media responses to Ruskin’s 200th birthday in 2019, to show how touch, literally and idiomatically, becomes an ethical preoccupation in these representations. She will explore how these depictions of Ruskin verge on anti-intellectualism and complicate the accessibility of Ruskin’s work for those outside of academic and art spaces. She will end with a call to action on how we can make Ruskin more accessible in our everyday media use.
Ann Gagné is an Educational Developer (Universal Design for Learning) at the University of Toronto Mississauga and an adjunct Communications instructor at George Brown College. Her work and research focusses on supporting accessible pedagogy, especially through reference to the sensory. Her book Embodying the Tactile in Victorian Literature: Touching Bodies/ Bodies Touching was published by Lexington Press in 2021. Other Ruskin focused publications include “Architecture and Perception: The Science of Art in Ruskin” (2019) in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature and “Recovering a Ruskinian Tactile Ethics of Architecture” (2019) in Modern Horizons Journal. She has presented on Ruskin and tactility at international conferences such as NAVSA, NeMLA, VSAWC, and at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Companion of the Guild of St. George a board member of the Ruskin Society of North America