Skip to main content

Danielle Child

The University of Manchester, Art History and Cultural Practices, Faculty Member

University of Leeds, Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, Alumna

Followers

120

Following

87

Co-authors

6

Public Views

Art historian and theorist (mid-20th/21st Century, historical materialist) interested in 'social practices' in art, with a particular focus on labour: collaboration; contracted labour within and outside of the studio; socially-engaged artistic practices; artists' groups/collectives; 'public' art; art-activism; social class and the economic sphere.

Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries, The University of Manchester, UK

less

University of Delaware

The University of Texas at Austin

Julita Vassileva

University of Saskatchewan

Lancaster University

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

Northwestern University

Kansas State University

Fordham University

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

University of Cologne

InterestsView All (29)

Uploads

Papers by Danielle Child

Civic responsibility in times of crisis

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jun 25, 2024

Labours of Love

Third text, Jan 2, 2017

Passion: The social (re)production of art workers from industrialisation to globalisation', panel... more Passion: The social (re)production of art workers from industrialisation to globalisation', panel convenors Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd invited the authors to contribute to a conversation on socially reproductive labour in the art world. The three contributors approach the subject from different perspectives; Danielle is an art historian who adopts a Marxist, historical materialist approach to thinking about artistic production. A curator and researcher with a longstanding interest in the histories and current relevance of queer and feminist engagements with art, theory and activism, Helena is engaged with how those histories translate and transmit across time, place and context. Recently her research has focused on affective and caring labour within the curatorial and artistic field. Jenny works collaboratively with artists and academics to develop practicebased research projects and public exhibitions that investigate labour and its gendered division. Due to the article's concern with the conditions under which cultural and academic work occurs, the authors felt that it was important that they make visible their labour involved in writing this text. The discussion took place over the course of several Skype calls and collective online writing sessions in June and July 2016. The practice-based conversational format felt more appropriate than the traditional monologic approach to academic writing. Rather than presenting research as an individual pursuit, the conversation has the potential to encourage and reveal its collaborative nature, juxtaposing insights gained from 'theory' and 'practice', and testing them one against the other. This format also prompted the authors to delve into all aspects of their lives, including their class backgrounds, familial expectations, and their work experiences in the art, academic and service sectors. The conversation is presented under four headings, which originated from a set of prompt questions established by the authors. The text begins with each contributor unpacking the term 'labours of love', before expanding into discussions about academic labour and curatorial work within the neoliberal context, and as experienced by the participants. In the second section the authors consider strategies of resistance to the neoliberal work condition through tactics of unlearning or dis-identification. The third section begins with Silvia Federici's concept of the 'double character of work' (which at once reproduces and valorizes us as feminized subjects both for and against our integration to the labour market), sparking a discussion of feminist sociologist Emma Dowling's distinction between value and valorization. The final section returns to questions of social reproduction and art, drawing upon the feminist critique of Marx prompted by a consideration of the historical relationships (and divisions) between Marxist and feminist art histories. Helena Reckitt: Starting with our own experiences working in art, culture, and education, I'd observe that the idea that people are motivated by love, rather than for material gain, is endemic to the curatorial field that I come out of and the curating Masters programme that I teach on. It stems from art's association with the leisured, land and property-owning classes, in which collecting and working with art were signs of class prestige, rather than terrains of labour. Passionate work implies either pleasure or sacrifice, as the rewards are emotional, self-expressive or spiritual, rather than financial. The sacrifices that artists have historically made in their devotion to their art are now expected of everyone who works in the cultural sector. Applicants to the Goldsmiths MFA Curating programme, who are predominantly female and from European, North American and Asian (but rarely Black British) backgrounds, regularly write of their love for art in vocational terms, and of their education as an investment in the self. 'How can I afford not to undertake my MA at the best possible institution, despite the debt I will incur?', one candidate wrote this year. Jenny Richards: 'A labour of love' was a term I used in 2015 for an artist symposium in Edinburgh. 1 Like the editors of this special issue, I was concerned with the implications of loving one's work and what this means for how we put ourselves to work when love is involved? (And indeed, what implications does this performance have on our love lives?) The symposium title came from a 1975 essay by the feminist activist and theorist Silvia Federici, 'A Labour of Love,' 2 which discusses the cultural conception of housework. In the essay she unpacks that domestic work is not only an unpaid activity performed without question, as it has been naturalised as women's social role, but that it is an activity that we are taught must be enjoyed and executed with a smile. To render the labour of the home as a labour of love is a key component to establishing it as a type of activity that escapes categorisation as work, and thus society can continue to undervalue its character.

Art and Class today (1960-2020), guest editor Jacopo Galimberti, 45 vol 2 issue, Oxford Art Journal (cover and index)

by Jacopo Galimberti and Danielle Child

The Great Escape: The Visibility of Class in Tracey Emin’s Margate

Oxford Art Journal

To Hell with (the contemporary commodification of) Culture

In 1941 Herbert Read - a British art critic, poet, novelist and political thinker - wrote an essa... more In 1941 Herbert Read - a British art critic, poet, novelist and political thinker - wrote an essay, to be published as a pamphlet in 'The Democratic Order' series, entitled 'To Hell with Culture'. The essay sought to criticise the capitalist co-optation of culture, whilst simultaneously calling for a functional art within a democratic society. As Matthew Adams notes in this issue, it was a peculiar essay within its series. Read focuses on art's role within society rather than the more 'immediate' (political, financial and material) issues facing British society during and after the Second World War. I came to Read's essay in 2013 after filmmaker Huw Wahl, who was making a film about Herbert Read, contacted me and requested to meet and talk about Read and his work. As a student at the University of Leeds, I had studied under Read's son - the Art Historian Benedict Read - during which time I encountered Herbert Read in his role as art critic. I had ...

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a bod... more In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avan...

<jats:p>Collage is an artistic technique first used in the 20th century in which paper, pho... more <jats:p>Collage is an artistic technique first used in the 20th century in which paper, photographs, fabric, and other items are glued onto paper or canvas. Collage was central to the development of Cubism and, in particular, to the work of Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Braque is said to have invented papiercollé, a specific form of collage where paper strips and fragments are pasted onto the drawing or painting. In 1912, the two artists began to introduce paper, cigarette packets, newspapers, and other items associated with everyday life into their canvases; Braque stated that he introduced these items into his work for their ''materiality.'' Picasso wrote that ''the purpose of papiercollé was to give the idea that different textures can enter into a composition to become reality in the painting that competes with reality in nature.'' For example, the artist would introduce paper that represented wood panelling for an image of a guitar. This countered the trompe l'oeil effects of painting, with Picasso proposing that the object created by collage was a ''displaced object'' that reflected their ''strange'' world. It can be argued that these fragments reflected the fragmentation of the modern world under capitalism, and closely aligns to the montage technique found in modernist mediums including writing, such as that of Walter Benjamin, the photography of artists such as Hannah Höch, and work of filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov.</jats:p>

Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956)

<jats:p>Jackson Pollock was one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in mid-twe... more <jats:p>Jackson Pollock was one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in mid-twentieth century America. He began his career working for the Federal Art Project, but is predominantly known for pioneering the ''drip'' technique in which, using sticks and brushes, the artist dripped paint onto the horizontal canvas. Hans Namuth famously filmed and photographed Pollock painting in 1951. Pollock was the focus of a number of American art critics in the 1950s, particularly Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Although unnamed, Pollock's method of working was the implicit content of Rosenberg's ''The American Action Painters'' (1952), in which the act of painting becomes the central focus of the work. It is Pollock's canvases that take center stage in Greenberg's historicization of ''modernist painting'' which followed a formalist trajectory of French painting through to contemporary American painting in the 1950s (this was later expanded in the 1960s to include the ''high modernist'' painters who developed from Pollock). The attention given to Pollock's method of painting further fostered the scrutiny of Pollock himself. His subsequent characterization in popular culture as a manic-depressive who struggled with alcoholism clouded an understanding of his contribution to modernist painting in later years.</jats:p>

Fried, Michael (1939--)

<jats:p>Michael Fried is an American art critic, literary critic and art historian. Fried i... more <jats:p>Michael Fried is an American art critic, literary critic and art historian. Fried is most well-known for his art criticism, which contributed to the debates on modernist painting and sculpture that were played out in the pages of American art journals, such as Artforum, during the 1960s. In 1958, while studying English as an undergraduate at Princeton University, Fried met Clement Greenberg, whose theories on modernist painting influenced Fried's subsequent writings and art criticism. He later studied under Richard Wollheim while at Oxford University. The formalist influence of Greenberg's art criticism is prevalent in Fried's two canonical texts on modernist art: "Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella" (1965), the catalogue essay for an exhibition curated by Fried at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum; and "Art and Objecthood" (1967). The former focuses upon three second-generation New York School painters, considered to be "high modernist." The latter is a defense of modernist painting against a new form of three-dimensional work that he terms "literal," now known as minimalist, sculpture. The argument initiated in these two essays formed a key moment in the debates that defined late-20th-century modernist art history. In the late 1960s Fried moved away from writing art criticism, focusing instead on modernist art in the 19th and early-20th centuries. He recently returned to contemporary art with his text Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.</jats:p>

Moving Mountains: Art History for the Neoliberal Era

L as Form is an important volume for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of socia... more L as Form is an important volume for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of socially engaged art. The volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name held in Essex Street Market, Manhattan, curated by Nato Thompson and co-authored by Creative Time—a New York-based non-profit arts organization—and Independent Curators International, NY. Thompson gathers together over one hundred projects in a collection of socially engaged art spanning twenty years. Although this is not an exhaustive compendium, it is a valuable sourcebook for anyone wishing to see what socially engaged art “does.” Thompson consulted twenty-five advising curators in preparation for the exhibition and the book, which is demonstrative of the collective nature of projects such as this. Whilst presenting a plethora of artists and artists’/community groups’ projects, the volume also collects together seven essays from key commentators on socially-engaged art: Nato Thompson (editor, Chief Curator at Creative Time, Seeing Power: Socially Engaged Art in the Age of Cultural Production), Claire Bishop (Participation, Artificial Hells), Maria Lind (Director of the Tensta Konsthall, independent curator and critic), Teddy Cruz (political architect, Estudio Teddy Cruz), Carol Becker (Thinking in Place), Brian Holmes (Unleashing the Collective Phantoms, Continental Drift) and Shannon Jackson (Social Works). Although these authors have the subject of socially engaged art in common, their approaches and methods are diverse—from activism and architecture through to curating and theatre—which aptly reflects the heterogeneous worlds in which socially engaged art manifests.

The artist as project manager: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002)

Journal of Arts & Communities, 2012

The nature of neo-liberal management theory, based on the artist as a model worker, has proven pr... more The nature of neo-liberal management theory, based on the artist as a model worker, has proven problematic for theorizing and analysing contemporary socially engaged artistic practices. In the past, these practices were considered to be hostile to capitalism but now, with the rise of project-driven work within mainstream business models, how can we understand the socially engaged artist's relationship to capitalism? The project, the network and communication have become key attributes within neo-liberal management discourse. In this article it is argued that a certain type of artistic practice has accompanied neo-liberalism that borrows these specific tropes akin to project management. It makes connections between Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's exploration of these ideological tropes in The New Spirit of Capitalism ([1999] 2007) and neo-liberal management ideas manifest in the Creative Industries in Britain. This analysis provides the theoretical base for examining Thomas Hirschhorn's role as a 'project manager' within the Bataille Monument (2002) project in the second half of the article. It is argued here that Hirschhorn retains his anti-capitalist leanings whilst also adopting neo-liberal management tropes in the articulation and execution of his project.

Kaprow, Allan (1927–2006)

<jats:p>Allan Kaprow was an American artist whose oeuvre included painting, assemblage, and... more <jats:p>Allan Kaprow was an American artist whose oeuvre included painting, assemblage, and "environments." He is best known as the originator of "happenings," a term he coined in the late 1950s. A "happening" refers to one-off (often scripted) performances, hosted across different locales, intended to break down the barrier between art and life by eliminating the distinction between artist and audience. Happenings played an important role in the transition from modernist painting to performance art in the mid-20th century. The debt that this new type of practice owes to modernist painting is made explicit in Kaprow's seminal essay, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," published in Art News, October 1958. In the essay, Kaprow proposes an alternative legacy to the formalist one established by American art critic Clement Greenberg. Kaprow boldly claimed that Pollock destroyed painting because in his so-called "action paintings," "artist, spectator and the outside world are interchangeably involved." Kaprow believed that happenings belonged to the legacy of Pollock's painting in that both produce works of art through commonplace actions. Pollock's paintings achieve this through a deskilled use of gesture; Kaprow's happenings do so in their ability to bring together non-art participants and performance through commonplace acts (such as shouting, eating lunch, brushing teeth).</jats:p>

Socialised Labour under change: collaboration, contracted labour and collective modes of production in art since the 1960s

Adopting an historical materialist methodology, this thesis examines how artistic labour is affec... more Adopting an historical materialist methodology, this thesis examines how artistic labour is affected under specific phases of capitalism from monopoly through neoliberal capitalism. It is not the intention here to argue that artists directly adopt or accept capitalist tropes; rather, it is to argue that the recent socialised artistic practices have a dialectical relationship to the social turn that capitalism has recently taken. The first chapter considers the establishment of US art fabrication firms in relation to the renewal of the deskilling thesis in the late 1960s by Harry Braverman. I argue that the deskilling that occurred in art making in the late 1960s – often termed the ‘dematerialisation of art’ (Lippard and Chandler) - was a response to the ideological changes that originated from the implementation of Taylorist and Fordist production methods in the US. The second chapter addresses the establishment of the Mike Smith Studio in London – an artist facilitator – in terms o...

Art, politics and the public square: From decoration to declaration!

Art & the Public Sphere, Sep 1, 2017

The term 'public art' has long conjured images of modernist sculpture as baubles for the British ... more The term 'public art' has long conjured images of modernist sculpture as baubles for the British new towns or monuments to historical figures. Efforts to revisit the term and reassess its associations have made visible a new heterogeneous public art that engages with space, place and identity in new and diverse ways. Whilst these revisions subvert the traditional idea of public art as creating fixed, permanent structures, what remains in common with the public art of the past is the urban as a suitable site. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's fluid understanding of the city as an oeuvre, this article looks to the relationship between art, the urban and its material: the social. This article contributes a critical reading of the implied politics of three contemporary public art practices through returning to consider the political figure of the virtuoso (whose historical site is the public square) in Hannah Arendt's writings and revived in Paolo Virno's critique of neoliberalism. Arendt's understanding of the term is explored in relation to three public art projects: Tahrir Cinema (2011-), Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's Chalk (1998-2006) and Suzanne Lacy's Between the Door and the Street (2013) to propose that these works constitute contemporary political practices within the public realm. The city is a mediation among mediations. Containing the near order, it supports it; it maintains the relations of production and property; it is the place of their reproduction. Contained in the far order, it supports it; it incarnates it; it projects it over a terrain (the site) and on a plan, that of immediate life; it inscribes it, prescribes it, writes it. A text in a context so vast and ungraspable as such except by reflection.

CFP: After the Turn: New Directions in Socially Engaged Art Research

by Danielle Child and Mor Cohen מור כהן

Call for Papers: After the Turn: New Directions in Socially Engaged Art Research We are current... more

Artistic Economies: Shelter, Food and Clothing

Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Dematerialization, contracted labour and art fabrication: the deskilling of the artist in the age of late capitalism

Sculpture Journal

The political aesthetics of global protest: The Arab Spring and beyond edited by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots

Visual Studies

Socialised Labour under change: collaboration, contracted labour and collective modes of production in art since the 1960s

‘One Day Sculpture', June 2008-June 2009

Art & the Public Sphere, 2011

... 284291. Pine, Joseph B. and Gilmore, James H. (1999), The Experience Economy: Work is Theatr... more ... 284291. Pine, Joseph B. and Gilmore, James H. (1999), The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Every Business is a Stage, Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. Sehgal, Tino (2010), &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;The Museum Revisited&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;, Artforum, XLVIII: 10, pp. 281. ...

Civic responsibility in times of crisis

Manchester University Press eBooks, Jun 25, 2024

Labours of Love

Third text, Jan 2, 2017

Passion: The social (re)production of art workers from industrialisation to globalisation', panel... more Passion: The social (re)production of art workers from industrialisation to globalisation', panel convenors Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd invited the authors to contribute to a conversation on socially reproductive labour in the art world. The three contributors approach the subject from different perspectives; Danielle is an art historian who adopts a Marxist, historical materialist approach to thinking about artistic production. A curator and researcher with a longstanding interest in the histories and current relevance of queer and feminist engagements with art, theory and activism, Helena is engaged with how those histories translate and transmit across time, place and context. Recently her research has focused on affective and caring labour within the curatorial and artistic field. Jenny works collaboratively with artists and academics to develop practicebased research projects and public exhibitions that investigate labour and its gendered division. Due to the article's concern with the conditions under which cultural and academic work occurs, the authors felt that it was important that they make visible their labour involved in writing this text. The discussion took place over the course of several Skype calls and collective online writing sessions in June and July 2016. The practice-based conversational format felt more appropriate than the traditional monologic approach to academic writing. Rather than presenting research as an individual pursuit, the conversation has the potential to encourage and reveal its collaborative nature, juxtaposing insights gained from 'theory' and 'practice', and testing them one against the other. This format also prompted the authors to delve into all aspects of their lives, including their class backgrounds, familial expectations, and their work experiences in the art, academic and service sectors. The conversation is presented under four headings, which originated from a set of prompt questions established by the authors. The text begins with each contributor unpacking the term 'labours of love', before expanding into discussions about academic labour and curatorial work within the neoliberal context, and as experienced by the participants. In the second section the authors consider strategies of resistance to the neoliberal work condition through tactics of unlearning or dis-identification. The third section begins with Silvia Federici's concept of the 'double character of work' (which at once reproduces and valorizes us as feminized subjects both for and against our integration to the labour market), sparking a discussion of feminist sociologist Emma Dowling's distinction between value and valorization. The final section returns to questions of social reproduction and art, drawing upon the feminist critique of Marx prompted by a consideration of the historical relationships (and divisions) between Marxist and feminist art histories. Helena Reckitt: Starting with our own experiences working in art, culture, and education, I'd observe that the idea that people are motivated by love, rather than for material gain, is endemic to the curatorial field that I come out of and the curating Masters programme that I teach on. It stems from art's association with the leisured, land and property-owning classes, in which collecting and working with art were signs of class prestige, rather than terrains of labour. Passionate work implies either pleasure or sacrifice, as the rewards are emotional, self-expressive or spiritual, rather than financial. The sacrifices that artists have historically made in their devotion to their art are now expected of everyone who works in the cultural sector. Applicants to the Goldsmiths MFA Curating programme, who are predominantly female and from European, North American and Asian (but rarely Black British) backgrounds, regularly write of their love for art in vocational terms, and of their education as an investment in the self. 'How can I afford not to undertake my MA at the best possible institution, despite the debt I will incur?', one candidate wrote this year. Jenny Richards: 'A labour of love' was a term I used in 2015 for an artist symposium in Edinburgh. 1 Like the editors of this special issue, I was concerned with the implications of loving one's work and what this means for how we put ourselves to work when love is involved? (And indeed, what implications does this performance have on our love lives?) The symposium title came from a 1975 essay by the feminist activist and theorist Silvia Federici, 'A Labour of Love,' 2 which discusses the cultural conception of housework. In the essay she unpacks that domestic work is not only an unpaid activity performed without question, as it has been naturalised as women's social role, but that it is an activity that we are taught must be enjoyed and executed with a smile. To render the labour of the home as a labour of love is a key component to establishing it as a type of activity that escapes categorisation as work, and thus society can continue to undervalue its character.

Art and Class today (1960-2020), guest editor Jacopo Galimberti, 45 vol 2 issue, Oxford Art Journal (cover and index)

by Jacopo Galimberti and Danielle Child

The Great Escape: The Visibility of Class in Tracey Emin’s Margate

Oxford Art Journal

To Hell with (the contemporary commodification of) Culture

In 1941 Herbert Read - a British art critic, poet, novelist and political thinker - wrote an essa... more In 1941 Herbert Read - a British art critic, poet, novelist and political thinker - wrote an essay, to be published as a pamphlet in 'The Democratic Order' series, entitled 'To Hell with Culture'. The essay sought to criticise the capitalist co-optation of culture, whilst simultaneously calling for a functional art within a democratic society. As Matthew Adams notes in this issue, it was a peculiar essay within its series. Read focuses on art's role within society rather than the more 'immediate' (political, financial and material) issues facing British society during and after the Second World War. I came to Read's essay in 2013 after filmmaker Huw Wahl, who was making a film about Herbert Read, contacted me and requested to meet and talk about Read and his work. As a student at the University of Leeds, I had studied under Read's son - the Art Historian Benedict Read - during which time I encountered Herbert Read in his role as art critic. I had ...

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a bod... more In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avan...

<jats:p>Collage is an artistic technique first used in the 20th century in which paper, pho... more <jats:p>Collage is an artistic technique first used in the 20th century in which paper, photographs, fabric, and other items are glued onto paper or canvas. Collage was central to the development of Cubism and, in particular, to the work of Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Braque is said to have invented papiercollé, a specific form of collage where paper strips and fragments are pasted onto the drawing or painting. In 1912, the two artists began to introduce paper, cigarette packets, newspapers, and other items associated with everyday life into their canvases; Braque stated that he introduced these items into his work for their ''materiality.'' Picasso wrote that ''the purpose of papiercollé was to give the idea that different textures can enter into a composition to become reality in the painting that competes with reality in nature.'' For example, the artist would introduce paper that represented wood panelling for an image of a guitar. This countered the trompe l'oeil effects of painting, with Picasso proposing that the object created by collage was a ''displaced object'' that reflected their ''strange'' world. It can be argued that these fragments reflected the fragmentation of the modern world under capitalism, and closely aligns to the montage technique found in modernist mediums including writing, such as that of Walter Benjamin, the photography of artists such as Hannah Höch, and work of filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov.</jats:p>

Pollock, Jackson (1912–1956)

<jats:p>Jackson Pollock was one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in mid-twe... more <jats:p>Jackson Pollock was one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in mid-twentieth century America. He began his career working for the Federal Art Project, but is predominantly known for pioneering the ''drip'' technique in which, using sticks and brushes, the artist dripped paint onto the horizontal canvas. Hans Namuth famously filmed and photographed Pollock painting in 1951. Pollock was the focus of a number of American art critics in the 1950s, particularly Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Although unnamed, Pollock's method of working was the implicit content of Rosenberg's ''The American Action Painters'' (1952), in which the act of painting becomes the central focus of the work. It is Pollock's canvases that take center stage in Greenberg's historicization of ''modernist painting'' which followed a formalist trajectory of French painting through to contemporary American painting in the 1950s (this was later expanded in the 1960s to include the ''high modernist'' painters who developed from Pollock). The attention given to Pollock's method of painting further fostered the scrutiny of Pollock himself. His subsequent characterization in popular culture as a manic-depressive who struggled with alcoholism clouded an understanding of his contribution to modernist painting in later years.</jats:p>

Fried, Michael (1939--)

<jats:p>Michael Fried is an American art critic, literary critic and art historian. Fried i... more <jats:p>Michael Fried is an American art critic, literary critic and art historian. Fried is most well-known for his art criticism, which contributed to the debates on modernist painting and sculpture that were played out in the pages of American art journals, such as Artforum, during the 1960s. In 1958, while studying English as an undergraduate at Princeton University, Fried met Clement Greenberg, whose theories on modernist painting influenced Fried's subsequent writings and art criticism. He later studied under Richard Wollheim while at Oxford University. The formalist influence of Greenberg's art criticism is prevalent in Fried's two canonical texts on modernist art: "Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella" (1965), the catalogue essay for an exhibition curated by Fried at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum; and "Art and Objecthood" (1967). The former focuses upon three second-generation New York School painters, considered to be "high modernist." The latter is a defense of modernist painting against a new form of three-dimensional work that he terms "literal," now known as minimalist, sculpture. The argument initiated in these two essays formed a key moment in the debates that defined late-20th-century modernist art history. In the late 1960s Fried moved away from writing art criticism, focusing instead on modernist art in the 19th and early-20th centuries. He recently returned to contemporary art with his text Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.</jats:p>

Moving Mountains: Art History for the Neoliberal Era

L as Form is an important volume for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of socia... more L as Form is an important volume for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of socially engaged art. The volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name held in Essex Street Market, Manhattan, curated by Nato Thompson and co-authored by Creative Time—a New York-based non-profit arts organization—and Independent Curators International, NY. Thompson gathers together over one hundred projects in a collection of socially engaged art spanning twenty years. Although this is not an exhaustive compendium, it is a valuable sourcebook for anyone wishing to see what socially engaged art “does.” Thompson consulted twenty-five advising curators in preparation for the exhibition and the book, which is demonstrative of the collective nature of projects such as this. Whilst presenting a plethora of artists and artists’/community groups’ projects, the volume also collects together seven essays from key commentators on socially-engaged art: Nato Thompson (editor, Chief Curator at Creative Time, Seeing Power: Socially Engaged Art in the Age of Cultural Production), Claire Bishop (Participation, Artificial Hells), Maria Lind (Director of the Tensta Konsthall, independent curator and critic), Teddy Cruz (political architect, Estudio Teddy Cruz), Carol Becker (Thinking in Place), Brian Holmes (Unleashing the Collective Phantoms, Continental Drift) and Shannon Jackson (Social Works). Although these authors have the subject of socially engaged art in common, their approaches and methods are diverse—from activism and architecture through to curating and theatre—which aptly reflects the heterogeneous worlds in which socially engaged art manifests.

The artist as project manager: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002)

Journal of Arts & Communities, 2012

The nature of neo-liberal management theory, based on the artist as a model worker, has proven pr... more The nature of neo-liberal management theory, based on the artist as a model worker, has proven problematic for theorizing and analysing contemporary socially engaged artistic practices. In the past, these practices were considered to be hostile to capitalism but now, with the rise of project-driven work within mainstream business models, how can we understand the socially engaged artist's relationship to capitalism? The project, the network and communication have become key attributes within neo-liberal management discourse. In this article it is argued that a certain type of artistic practice has accompanied neo-liberalism that borrows these specific tropes akin to project management. It makes connections between Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's exploration of these ideological tropes in The New Spirit of Capitalism ([1999] 2007) and neo-liberal management ideas manifest in the Creative Industries in Britain. This analysis provides the theoretical base for examining Thomas Hirschhorn's role as a 'project manager' within the Bataille Monument (2002) project in the second half of the article. It is argued here that Hirschhorn retains his anti-capitalist leanings whilst also adopting neo-liberal management tropes in the articulation and execution of his project.

Kaprow, Allan (1927–2006)

<jats:p>Allan Kaprow was an American artist whose oeuvre included painting, assemblage, and... more <jats:p>Allan Kaprow was an American artist whose oeuvre included painting, assemblage, and "environments." He is best known as the originator of "happenings," a term he coined in the late 1950s. A "happening" refers to one-off (often scripted) performances, hosted across different locales, intended to break down the barrier between art and life by eliminating the distinction between artist and audience. Happenings played an important role in the transition from modernist painting to performance art in the mid-20th century. The debt that this new type of practice owes to modernist painting is made explicit in Kaprow's seminal essay, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," published in Art News, October 1958. In the essay, Kaprow proposes an alternative legacy to the formalist one established by American art critic Clement Greenberg. Kaprow boldly claimed that Pollock destroyed painting because in his so-called "action paintings," "artist, spectator and the outside world are interchangeably involved." Kaprow believed that happenings belonged to the legacy of Pollock's painting in that both produce works of art through commonplace actions. Pollock's paintings achieve this through a deskilled use of gesture; Kaprow's happenings do so in their ability to bring together non-art participants and performance through commonplace acts (such as shouting, eating lunch, brushing teeth).</jats:p>

Socialised Labour under change: collaboration, contracted labour and collective modes of production in art since the 1960s

Adopting an historical materialist methodology, this thesis examines how artistic labour is affec... more Adopting an historical materialist methodology, this thesis examines how artistic labour is affected under specific phases of capitalism from monopoly through neoliberal capitalism. It is not the intention here to argue that artists directly adopt or accept capitalist tropes; rather, it is to argue that the recent socialised artistic practices have a dialectical relationship to the social turn that capitalism has recently taken. The first chapter considers the establishment of US art fabrication firms in relation to the renewal of the deskilling thesis in the late 1960s by Harry Braverman. I argue that the deskilling that occurred in art making in the late 1960s – often termed the ‘dematerialisation of art’ (Lippard and Chandler) - was a response to the ideological changes that originated from the implementation of Taylorist and Fordist production methods in the US. The second chapter addresses the establishment of the Mike Smith Studio in London – an artist facilitator – in terms o...

Art, politics and the public square: From decoration to declaration!

Art & the Public Sphere, Sep 1, 2017

The term 'public art' has long conjured images of modernist sculpture as baubles for the British ... more The term 'public art' has long conjured images of modernist sculpture as baubles for the British new towns or monuments to historical figures. Efforts to revisit the term and reassess its associations have made visible a new heterogeneous public art that engages with space, place and identity in new and diverse ways. Whilst these revisions subvert the traditional idea of public art as creating fixed, permanent structures, what remains in common with the public art of the past is the urban as a suitable site. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's fluid understanding of the city as an oeuvre, this article looks to the relationship between art, the urban and its material: the social. This article contributes a critical reading of the implied politics of three contemporary public art practices through returning to consider the political figure of the virtuoso (whose historical site is the public square) in Hannah Arendt's writings and revived in Paolo Virno's critique of neoliberalism. Arendt's understanding of the term is explored in relation to three public art projects: Tahrir Cinema (2011-), Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's Chalk (1998-2006) and Suzanne Lacy's Between the Door and the Street (2013) to propose that these works constitute contemporary political practices within the public realm. The city is a mediation among mediations. Containing the near order, it supports it; it maintains the relations of production and property; it is the place of their reproduction. Contained in the far order, it supports it; it incarnates it; it projects it over a terrain (the site) and on a plan, that of immediate life; it inscribes it, prescribes it, writes it. A text in a context so vast and ungraspable as such except by reflection.

CFP: After the Turn: New Directions in Socially Engaged Art Research

by Danielle Child and Mor Cohen מור כהן

Call for Papers: After the Turn: New Directions in Socially Engaged Art Research We are current... more

Artistic Economies: Shelter, Food and Clothing

Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Dematerialization, contracted labour and art fabrication: the deskilling of the artist in the age of late capitalism

Sculpture Journal

The political aesthetics of global protest: The Arab Spring and beyond edited by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman-Poots

Visual Studies

Socialised Labour under change: collaboration, contracted labour and collective modes of production in art since the 1960s

‘One Day Sculpture', June 2008-June 2009

Art & the Public Sphere, 2011

... 284291. Pine, Joseph B. and Gilmore, James H. (1999), The Experience Economy: Work is Theatr... more ... 284291. Pine, Joseph B. and Gilmore, James H. (1999), The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Every Business is a Stage, Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. Sehgal, Tino (2010), &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;The Museum Revisited&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;, Artforum, XLVIII: 10, pp. 281. ...

Art & the Public Square: From decoration to declaration!, Artists' Critical Interventions into Architecture and Urbanism, University of Warwick, July 2016

The term ‘public art’ has long conjured images of mid-twentieth century modernist sculpture as ba... more The term ‘public art’ has long conjured images of mid-twentieth century modernist sculpture as baubles for the British new towns or monuments to monarchs, dictators and historical war figures. Efforts to revisit the term and reassess its associations by Suzanne Lacy, in the US, and, more recently, Claire Doherty and Situations, in the UK, have made visible a new heterogeneous public art that engages with space, place and identity in new and diverse ways. Whilst the these revisions subvert the traditional idea of public art as creating fixed, permanent structures, what remains in common with the public art of the past is the urban as a suitable site. Taking up Henri Lefebvre’s fluid understanding of the city as an oeuvre (as opposed to a series of arranged, fixed material structures), this paper looks to the relationship between art, the urban and its material: the social.
The social, in this sense, will be understood as a political concept. Although we have to approach ‘new’ modes of art making critically - for example, we might question who benefits from the ‘social’ of ‘socially-engaged art’ - this paper asks whether we could understand the new conception of public art as engaging with a political conception of public? Drawing on the writings of Hannah Arendt and Paolo Virno, the paper will discuss practices in relation to the political conception of virtuoso, whose historical site was that of the public square. With the return of the public square as a key site of recent political protest, revolution and contestations since 2011, this paper explores the situating of new social artistic practices in key urban sites, such as the public square, as a political practice.

Demystifying Labour in Contemporary Art History: Unproductive Labour and Social Reproduction, Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh, April 2016

In Marxist thought, art is often categorized as ‘unproductive labour’, that is, labour that is ou... more In Marxist thought, art is often categorized as ‘unproductive labour’, that is, labour that is outside the capitalist mode of production. Similarly, social reproduction is not explicitly considered as directly productive labour (in the sense that it does not produce a commodity). Through this assignation, social reproduction (domestic, reproductive and familial labour) and artistic labour become allies. However, since the ‘neoliberal turn’, managers have embraced labour models adopting the distinct traits of artistic (Boltanski and Chiapello) and socially reproductive labour, culminating in the categorization and subsequent analysis of ‘affective’ and ‘immaterial’ labour (Hardt and Negri, Lazzarato) within the contemporary mode of capitalism. How, then, can we rethink the relationship between unproductive labour and art today?
Responding to the call for an alternative art history with an embedded social reproduction, this paper will explore the connection between social reproduction and art through returning to Marx’s categories of ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive labour’ from Theories of Surplus Value (1863). The discussion will take as its examples works that reference both socially reproductive and productive labour, before the ‘neoliberal turn’ (such as Hunt, Harrison and Kelly’s Women and Work: A Documentation on the Division of Labour, 1973-5) and within the contemporary period (Rimini Protokol, Call Cutta in a Box, 2008-10). Whilst work and life are becoming increasingly blurred under neoliberal working models, this paper stresses the importance of making the subject of labour (and its associations with class) visible within art history.

Directors, Actors and Virtuosos: The performative shift in neoliberal social art practices

Abstract for Historical Materialism Rome Conference 2015 paper.

Performing Action: The Global Theatre of Art-activism

Protest can be understood as a form of action in which key tropes of theatre and performance – ac... more Protest can be understood as a form of action in which key tropes of theatre and performance – acting, the use of props and the presence of an audience – are utilised for the purpose of politics. Jeremy Deller’s 2001 reenactment of the 1984 miner’s strike through The Battle of Orgreave project, perhaps, makes clear the relationship between the two. It draws attention to the political struggle on the one hand, and a site-specific performance, on the other. However, this kind of performance further problematises the nature and efficacy of protest as a political activity. Deller’s piece belongs to a newer genre of artistic work which utilises elements of the performative in order to engage the viewer, but not necessarily for the purpose of engaging a political consensus. The resulting film could further be considered to be the aestheticisation of protest. However, this is not to say that all contemporary artistic practices simply perform.
Through utilising theatrical devices, Deller engages with a political past and one that originated from the implementation of neoliberal policies within the UK. This paper will examine how the now-dominant neoliberal ideology, which takes the performer – what Paolo Virno has called the ‘virtuoso’ – as a model worker, assists practices that are counter to capitalism. Through bringing together the creative individualism once found in the somewhat mythical model of the artist and the connectivity of networks and ad hoc projects, neoliberalism has enabled an artistic practice critical of capitalism to grow and, more importantly, to organise. The dual nature of socially-engaged works of art – as theatrical and political - allows for a creative model of protest to be thought, exemplified in the diverse art-activist practices of Liberate Tate, the Reverend Billy and Billionaires For Bush; one that is both creative and affective.

Dematerialisation, Contracted Labour and Postproduction: The Deskilling of the Artist in the Age of Late Capitalism

Could You Make Me One Like That? Examining the YBAs’ Aesthetic and the Mike Smith Studio

This paper questions the glossy aesthetic of the three dimensional work of the Young British Arti... more This paper questions the glossy aesthetic of the three dimensional work of the Young British Artists (YBAs) with regards to the studio fabricating the artworks, the Mike Smith Studio in London. Rather than adopting the line that the YBAs were consciously reacting against those sculptors that came before, I propose that the YBAs were very much a subconscious product of the Mike Smith Studio; the Studio itself emerging within the backdrop of neoliberalist Britain. Therefore, I discuss the incarnation of the Mike Smith Studio, and subsequently the polished fabricated aesthetic of the YBAs, as a response to the ideological, political and economic conditions of 1990sʼ Britain. Key aspects of the new economic model implemented under capitalism since the 1970s being the subcontracting and outsourcing of manufacture which artists and art businesses also adopt on their own terms thereafter.
The outsourcing of work is not new to British sculpture, however, the kind of services offered and the manufacturing possibilities associated with the appearance of non-art are particular to art-specific fabricators. Whilst situating the emergence of the Mike Smith Studio (arguably the first of its kind in England) within the context of 1990s Britain, I draw parallels and distinctions between the fabricators founded in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, arguing that the Mike Smith Studio adopted and adapted the practices of these earlier business models. As a result of this I put forward the proposition that the YBAs are more akin to the artists associated with the American minimal art movement in their working practices (closely aligned with the art fabricators Gratz Industries and Lippincott Inc.) as opposed to their ʻfound objectʼ British forefathers.

To Hell with Culture? Conference, Manchester School of Art, 30th October 2014

Review: Dave Beech, Art and Postcapitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2019)

Burlington Contemporary , 2020

http://burlingtoncontemporary.org.uk/reviews/reviews/art-and-postcapitalism

Review of Claire Doherty, ed., Out of Time, Out of Place: Public Art (Now) , Art and the Public Sphere Journal, 3:2, 2014, pp.199- 203.

The Hand, and the Virtual

Moving Mountains: Art History for the Neoliberal Era

Reviews in Cultural Theory, Oct 15, 2012

Review of David Harvey's 'A Companion to Marx's Capital'

CFP: Deskilling or the Displacement of Skill: Artistic production outside of the studio

Call for Papers for a session at the Association for Art History Annual Conference 2018, 5 – 7 AP... more

Working Aesthetics flyer.pdf