- The Courtauld Institute of Art, Modern and Contemporary, AlumnusUniversity of Edinburgh, History of Art, Alumnus, and 2 moreadd
- Theodor Adorno, Activist Art, Contemporary Art, Conceptual and post-conceptual art, Critical Art, Intersections in Visual Art and Design, and 58 moreInternet Art, Institutional Critique, Virtual Art & Virtual Reality, New Media Art, Minimalism, Installation Art, Immaterial Labour, Site-Specific Art, Art History, Fredric Jameson, Historical Materialism, Critical Theory, Karl Marx, Communism, Marxism, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), History of Art, Photography, Globalization, Michel Foucault, Postmodernism, Relational aesthetics, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Jens Haaning, Juliane Rebentisch, Biopolitics, Theodor W. Adorno, Contemporaneity, Steven Shaviro, Frankfurt School, Allan Sekula, Jacques Rancière, Dan Graham, Tobias Rehberger, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, Andrea Fraser, Heimo Zobernig, Terry Smith, Globalism, Postmodernity, Susan Buck-Morss, Peter Osborne, Abstract Art, Gilles Deleuze, Sculpture, Conceptual Art, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, British Art since the 1980s, Fordism and Post-Fordism, Daniel Buren, Peter Halley, Architecture, American art/ Art of the United States, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, and Modernism and Postmodernism In Architectureedit
- I am a lecturer in art history at Christie's Education London. My interests centre on relationships between contempor... moreI am a lecturer in art history at Christie's Education London. My interests centre on relationships between contemporary art, design and architecture, and my monograph, 'Art, Design and Capital since the 1980s: Production by Design', is forthcoming with Routledge. I completed my MA (Hons) in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh (2003), and my MA (2006) and PhD (2010) at the Courtauld Institute of Art.edit
- Julian Stallabrassedit
This essay revisits American artist Dan Graham's original motivations for the development of his long‐running series of pavilion sculptures. It explores their relationship to minimalist art of the 1960s and to the postmodern architecture... more
This essay revisits American artist Dan Graham's original motivations for the development of his long‐running series of pavilion sculptures. It explores their relationship to minimalist art of the 1960s and to the postmodern architecture of the 1970s and 1980s, before considering the implications of their large number and global spread for their current critical purchase. It is argued that the proliferation of Graham's pavilions across innumerable sites since the early 1980s augments their mimicry of corporate architecture, lending additional credence to existing claims made for his work as a critical parallel to wider architectural trends. This is especially the case in so far as contemporary corporate architecture itself, as a key expression of today's ruling logic of finance capitalism, is programmed to proliferate as a ‘spatial fix’ for capital's periodic crises of over‐accumulation, as a means to absorb surplus capital.
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This article discusses the ongoing pertinence to the present of Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism in the context of recent elaborations of “the contemporary” and “contemporaneity” in art history, theory and criticism. It is argued... more
This article discusses the ongoing pertinence to the present of Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism in the context of recent elaborations of “the contemporary” and “contemporaneity” in art history, theory and criticism. It is argued that, while postmodernism is fraught with contradiction and in any case irretrievable by now as a periodization of the present, it nonetheless remains crucially instructive for a fuller understanding and politicization of contemporaneity. In particular, both the nature of the relationship between culture and capital, as well as the theoretical imperative to totalize remain central to Jameson's problematic in ways that the discourse on the contemporary threatens to undo, in its resistance to historicism, and in its tendency to insist, not merely upon the heterogeneity, but upon the incommensurability of global cultures and space-times.
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The work of British artist Liam Gillick (born 1964) offers a quintessential model of a flexible, multifaceted, project-based practice, while a number of his key works thematize contemporary post-Fordist production more widely. Examining... more
The work of British artist Liam Gillick (born 1964) offers a quintessential model of a flexible, multifaceted, project-based practice, while a number of his key works thematize contemporary post-Fordist production more widely. Examining the complex inter-articulation of Gillick’s artistic labour and his allusive portrayal of broader conditions of production, this essay constructs a picture of Gillick’s ‘post-Fordist aesthetics’ by focusing on activities related to the artist’s 1997 novella Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre, as well as the research project, Construcción de Uno, ongoing since 2004. The performative dimension of Gillick’s artistic labour is revealed to be key to an understanding of his practice; the sovereignty of discrete works is constantly thwarted by Gillick’s dynamics of proliferation and delay, and a perpetual relay between exhibition and text. By systematically attending to the constellational interplay of the various elements of Gillick’s work, a clearer picture can thus be formed of a practice that enacts a ‘flexibilized’ divergence from, and convergence with, the very cultural logic that it seeks to diagnose.
Research Interests: Installation Art, Contemporary Art, Theodor Adorno, Abstract Art, Gilles Deleuze, and 11 moreMinimalism, Sculpture, Immaterial Labour, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Conceptual Art, Intersections in Visual Art and Design, British Art since the 1980s, Fordism and Post-Fordism, Liam Gillick, Daniel Buren, and Peter Halley
This article considers photographer and theorist Allan Sekula’s exhibition and book project, Fish Story (1989-1995), the first in an ongoing series of works by Sekula that explore the ocean as a key space of globalisation. In the light of... more
This article considers photographer and theorist Allan Sekula’s exhibition and book project, Fish Story (1989-1995), the first in an ongoing series of works by Sekula that explore the ocean as a key space of globalisation. In the light of these returns, the article frames the work as the pivotal articulation of Sekula’s effort to renew the terms of a realist art in the wake of the hegemony of postmodern culture of the 1980s, and as a key expression of an emergent shift from a culture of postmodernism to one of globalism.
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Ina Blom's 2007 book On the Style Site: Art, Sociality, and Media Culture is the most sustained and sophisticated attempt so far to analyse, from the perspective of post-autonomist debates concerning biopolitics and immaterial labour, the... more
Ina Blom's 2007 book On the Style Site: Art, Sociality, and Media Culture is the most sustained and sophisticated attempt so far to analyse, from the perspective of post-autonomist debates concerning biopolitics and immaterial labour, the work of some of the most prolific international artists to emerge during the 1990s. This article specifies Blom's claims before examining in greater detail the key theoretical assumptions underlying her argument that the ‘style site works’ of Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others are most attuned to contemporary possibilities for critical practice. Blom defends these artists' immanent engagements with spectacle and style by invoking the biopolitical mantra that life-time and work-time have become indivisible as a result of the proliferation of media technologies into every corner of contemporary life. In doing so, Blom rests her argument on the problematic claim that communication and sociality – characterised by plenitude – are today productive of surplus-value, which in the classical Marxian analysis results from the variability of supply, and hence fundamental scarcity, of labour.
Research Interests: Marxism, Installation Art, Contemporary Art, Spectacle, Gilles Deleuze, and 17 moreMichel Foucault, Immaterial Labour, Biopolitics, Karl Marx, Autonomist Marxism, Ina Blom 'On the Style Site, Benjamin Buchloh, Style, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Post-Workerism, Disciplinary Society, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, David Joselit, Society of Control, and Mark Godfrey
"The photographic and textual practice of Allan Sekula offers an object lesson in today’s possibilities for an artistic-political commitment to labour’s cause, and his career-long pursuit of a contemporary ‘critical realism’ reached... more
"The photographic and textual practice of Allan Sekula offers an object lesson in today’s possibilities for an artistic-political commitment to labour’s cause, and his career-long pursuit of a contemporary ‘critical realism’ reached perhaps its most complex articulation in the exhibition and book project, Fish Story, completed between 1989 and 1995. Fish Story did much to place consideration of globalised commodity production and distribution firmly on the table for art’s documentary and ‘social turn’ of the mid-late 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, while it also marked Sekula’s first sustained exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalisation, a subject to which he has returned in subsequent photography and film projects.
In this article, I frame the work as the interarticulation of Sekula’s own effort to renew the terms of a realist art, in the wake of the hegemony of postmodern simulacral culture of the 1980s, with the stirrings of a resurgent Marxist cultural politics in the early-mid 1990s. In doing so, I make the case for Fish Story’s pivotal place in the narrative of a gradual shift, beginning in the 1990s, from a widespread culture of resignation to one of renewed radical engagement."
In this article, I frame the work as the interarticulation of Sekula’s own effort to renew the terms of a realist art, in the wake of the hegemony of postmodern simulacral culture of the 1980s, with the stirrings of a resurgent Marxist cultural politics in the early-mid 1990s. In doing so, I make the case for Fish Story’s pivotal place in the narrative of a gradual shift, beginning in the 1990s, from a widespread culture of resignation to one of renewed radical engagement."
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This essay provides a critical account of the career of Danish artist Jens Haaning (born 1965), exploring his work by way of a number of pertinent themes. I begin by introducing the range of Haaning’s practice in the context of a... more
This essay provides a critical account of the career of Danish artist Jens Haaning (born 1965), exploring his work by way of a number of pertinent themes. I begin by introducing the range of Haaning’s practice in the context of a discussion of the artist’s background and artistic milieu, and especially his position within the Danish art world context. I then discuss Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas concerning relational aesthetics and consider the adequacy of this discourse as a critical frame for Haaning’s art. The final part of the essay broadens the discussion to consider the discourse on globalisation in relation to Haaning’s work, reciprocally employing Haaning as a ‘lever’ into an analysis of some of the claims of globalisation theory on its own terms, as well as those of other related socio-economic and cultural discourses, principally sociological theories of informational society. Along the way, the socio-economic position of current international fine art practice is considered in the light of issues raised by these discourses.
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Marc James Léger’s 2012 book, Brave New Avant Garde, is a timely attempt to rethink avant-gardism within the context of today’s resurgence of ‘socially engaged’, ‘activist’ and ‘interventionist’ art. Léger criticises these currents of... more
Marc James Léger’s 2012 book, Brave New Avant Garde, is a timely attempt to rethink avant-gardism within the context of today’s resurgence of ‘socially engaged’, ‘activist’ and ‘interventionist’ art. Léger criticises these currents of practice as little more than a ‘capitalist demand’ and a betrayal of class struggle, arguing instead for ‘sinthomeopathic’ practices that over-identify with neoliberal ideology, as a means to foster the alienation of art’s audiences as a spur to ‘critical activity’. Situating Léger’s work in relation to the established discourse on avant-gardism as well as significant recent entries in the debate on artistic activism, this review essay identifies the contradictions of Léger’s critique and argues against his dismissal of socially engaged art. The review proposes instead that forms of participatory, collaborative and collectivist practice will, in some form, continue to perform a critical function within capitalist society, as a vital channel for the rethinking of art’s cultural form.
Research Interests: Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Avant-Garde, Activist Art, Institutional Critique, and 11 moreNeo-Avant-Garde, Hal Foster, Participatory and Relational Arts, Komar & Melamid, Peter Bürger, Laibach, Claire Bishop, Christoph Schlingensief, Marc James Léger, Brave New Avant Garde, Andrea Fraser, and Grant Kester
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Exhibition Review, 'Free', New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
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What happens when fine artists engage with architecture and urban space? What forms can such engagements take? What political issues arise at the junctures between these disciplines? During the modern period, when artists and critics have... more
What happens when fine artists engage with architecture and urban space? What forms can such engagements take? What political issues arise at the junctures between these disciplines? During the modern period, when artists and critics have often complained that fine art is overly remote from everyday life, one common way of overcoming this gap has been to draw on the greater social efficacy that architecture can seem to provide. However, in other instances artists have used their relatively autonomous position to criticise or interrupt the relationship between architecture, urbanisation and power. This conference will explore these issues as they arise in practices spanning the period from the 1960s to the present, exploring intersections between art, architecture and urbanism both within and outside Europe and North America.
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This thesis examines the strengths and limitations of political critique in North American and Western European art during the 1990s, as these are revealed and refracted through both artistic and critical attention to the forms and... more
This thesis examines the strengths and limitations of political critique in North American and Western European art during the 1990s, as these are revealed and refracted through both artistic and critical attention to the forms and conditions of artistic labour. I argue that the weight of significant practices and trends in critical art of the 1990s registers a gradual (tendential rather than total) shift away from a melancholic, recursive focus on the public, democratic ideal of the museum (as the dominant or determinant form of the art institution) as the salient model of artistic critique, amid profound social, art-institutional and technological changes during the decade. Gaining momentum especially towards the millennium, and to a considerable extent laying the foundations for the renewed visibility of diverse socially engaged and activist practices since 2000, the key shift in critical art during the 1990s takes the shape of a gradual expansion or redirection of critical energies towards a more explicitly political, and above all anti-capitalist, arena, following what amounted to the relative eclipse of this by the end of the 1980s.
Changes at the levels of art’s form and forms of production are key indexes of this shift, marked by the new prominence of diffuse, collective authorship and the unravelling of the unity of the net-/artwork in emergent activist work. Moving from a ‘context art’ that is heir to the deconstructive ambitions of critical postmodernism, through ‘design art’ and ‘relational art’ currents, to the rise of networked anti-capitalist practices, the thesis pictures the 1990s as a decade during which institutional critique is progressively unsettled by, and squeezed between, the ongoing corporatisation of art institutions, the emergence of the art industry as a sophisticated economy of production, the derealisation of experience in postmodern society, and the rise of a counter-hegemonic network culture.
Changes at the levels of art’s form and forms of production are key indexes of this shift, marked by the new prominence of diffuse, collective authorship and the unravelling of the unity of the net-/artwork in emergent activist work. Moving from a ‘context art’ that is heir to the deconstructive ambitions of critical postmodernism, through ‘design art’ and ‘relational art’ currents, to the rise of networked anti-capitalist practices, the thesis pictures the 1990s as a decade during which institutional critique is progressively unsettled by, and squeezed between, the ongoing corporatisation of art institutions, the emergence of the art industry as a sophisticated economy of production, the derealisation of experience in postmodern society, and the rise of a counter-hegemonic network culture.