Thursday 9 January 2014

Theorists, Revisited

I wouldn't bother reading this!

It's just a list of art theorists and a paragraph or so about them, copied directly from stuff on the Internet.

I had to do this for homework but as you might have gathered from my previous post on art theorists,  I've yet to understand why I should be interested in them.

The first three were cited by Kim Charnley in his “Making Futures” paper on “The Politics of Making: Contemporary Art, Craft and Social Practice” in the mini Making Futures conference (see next post). I couldn’t follow his argument but it was handy that he identified 3 theorists!

Claire Bishop


Claire Bishop is an art historian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is the author of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Professor Claire Bishop joined the Graduate Center in 2008, after teaching at Warwick University (UK) and the Royal College of Art, London. She is interested in post-medium specific art (performance art, installation, social practice, conceptual art) and exhibition history. Recurrent themes in her research are spectatorship and the relationship between art and politics. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and other magazines.

Grant Kester


Grant Kester is Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. Kester is one of the leading figures in the emerging critical dialogue around “relational” or “dialogical” art practices.

Community arts, also sometimes known as "dialogical art", "community-engaged" or "community-based art," refers to artistic activity based in a community setting. Works from this genre can be of any media and is characterized by interaction or dialogue with the community. Often professional artists collaborate with people who may not otherwise normally actively engage in the arts. The term was defined in the late-1960s and spawned a movement which grew in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia. In Scandinavia, the term "community art" means more often contemporary art project.   


Shannon Jackson

Shannon Jackson is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. She is also the Director of the Arts Research Center. Shannon’s most recent book is Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge 2011), and she is  working on a book about The Builders Association. Shannon’s previous books are Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (2000) andProfessing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004).


The ones I listed in my previous post:


Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born November 30, 1941) is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum, Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.

Hal Foster

Harold Foss "Hal" Foster (born August 13, 1955) is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Foster's criticism focuses on the role of the avant-garde within postmodernism. In 1983, he edited The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a seminal text in postmodernism. In Recodings (1985), he promoted a vision of postmodernism that simultaneously engaged its avant-garde history and commented on contemporary society. In The Return of the Real (1996), he proposed a model of historical recurrence of the avant-garde in which each cycle would improve upon the inevitable failures of previous cycles. He views his roles as critic and historian of art as complementary rather than mutually opposed.

Yve-Alain Bois

Bois is a professor at the European Graduate School and at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the chair inaugurated by Erwin Panofsky.[ Previously, he served on the faculty at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.   Bois has written books and articles on artists of European modernism. He is an editor of the journal October.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Born in Cologne, Germany on November 15, 1941, Buchloh received a M.Phil in German literature from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1969. He later obtained his Ph.D in art history in 1994 from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, where he studied with fellow art historian Rosalind Krauss.
After time as an editor for German art journal Interfunktionen and teaching stints at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, NSCAD University, and CalArts, Buchloh began teaching art history at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and the University of Chicago. He later taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor from 1989–1994. From 1991–1993, he also served as the Director of Critical and Curatorial Studies for the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He then taught at both Columbia University and its sister college, Barnard College, as Virginia B. Wright Professor of Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art from 1994–2005, including service as a department chair from 1997–2000. He later joined the Harvard University department of History of Art and Architecture in 2005. He was named Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of Modern Art. In 2006, he was named Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art. Buchloh is currently also a co-editor of the art journal October. In 2007, Buchloh won the Golden Lion award at the 2007 Venice Biennale for his work as an art historian towards contributing to contemporary art.


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