University of Edinburgh

Faculty Member, Edinburgh College of Art

Professor of Contemporary Art Practice & Theory | Director of Masters in Contemporary Art | Associate Head of the School of Art

School of Art

About

I am an art historian and art critic. My research focuses on contemporary art practice and theory with particular emphasis on collaborative practice-based learning (Shift/Work), neomedievalism (Confraternity of Neoflagellants) artwriting and ambient cultures.

My focus is on the legacies of cutural practices, theories and their institutions emerging since the early-1970s. My work consists of a range of historical, critical and fictional approaches to writing as well as independent curatorial and art practice.

Current research projects:

- ‘Investigating Premodern Futures’™
confraternityofneoflagellants.org.uk

...is a neomedievalist collaboration with Norman Hogg.

The relentless association, from the Renaissance onwards, of the Middle Ages with the ‘hypereconomy’ of the gift, with whatever exceeds calculation or rationality, for good or for ill, has made the Middle Ages a marker of fantasy and excess. The Confraternity of Neoflagellants are lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture. They are attuned to the scent of medieval analogies relating to the (creative) commons, the folkmote/folksonomy, the plateau of middle, post-post-industrialism (Goth, silvercasting, experience economies) and to geopolitical debates in the current era of ‘zombie capitalism’ and the ‘new irrationalism’.

Our premodern futures have particular resonance with what Howard Rheingold once prophesied as ‘the virtual community’. The Confraternity want to make these connections explicit by engaging with online culture both in the content of the work we are examining (which includes ambient technoculture and the ludic spaces of video gaming) and in the form that it manifests itself.

- Shift/Work
tiny.cc/shift-work


Shift/Work is a collaboration with Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop consisting of a series of workshops and manuals designed to encourage collaborative practice-based learning.

Developing new sites in which art can be produced and expanding the ways in which production is supported are central to learning how to practice as an artist. To facilitate this, art education conventionally combines ‘structured’ historical and theoretical scholarship with ‘open’ practice-based learning agreements. This incoherent approach perpetuates the legacy of Romanticism, producing ‘autonomous’ auteurs rather than artist-learners. This does not prepare artists to participate in today’s artworld, a horizontally integrated network that is highly dependent upon reciprocal altruism.

Re-imagining the learning environment is key to facilitating the kinds of knowledge that artists now require. Developing an iterative action-based approach to artistic learning that is at once theoretical and practical is imperative.

Shift/Work aims to examine and reconfigure ways in which we can facilitate comprehensive workshop-based approaches to artistic production that are theoretically informed, practical and participatory. Shift/Work will facilitate new experiential knowledge, practices and tools for artists and art educators to adapt and implement.

- Ambient

I write about and contribute to practices that might be said to be 'ambient'. Ambient culture has interpretive flexibility, its use can’t be predicted by its makers; it is shaped by users for users. This means it is a two way process – ambient culture creates new subject positions just as subjects create new uses for ambient culture. Ambient culture is holistic; to engage with it fully requires participating in an ambient experience rather than simply establishing and supporting ambient tactics.

- Artwriting

I've established the School of Art, University of Edinburgh as the Scottish centre for Writing PAD. I've edited an edition of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. Much of my writing is concerned with establishing a more nuanced, polymathic model of the relationships between art history and theory, writing, curating and practice.

Membership, Advisory and Press:

- Member of College Art Association, New York, USA.
- Member of the International Association of Art Critics (www.aica-int.org), Paris, France.

- Advisory Board, PARS+S, Scottish Arts Council, Scotland. www.publicartscotland.com
- External Examiner BA (Hons) Fine Art, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, Birmingham City University, Birmingham.
- External Examiner in Art, Design and Media, University of Portsmouth.
- Coordinator, Writing PAD (Scotland) www.writing-pad.ac.uk
- Correspondent for Flash Art International, Milan.
- Correspondent for Art Review, London.

Contact Information