Goldsmiths, University of London

Faculty Member, Visual Cultures

Senior Lecturer

About

Trained as an artist and art historian, my research work has now broadened and encompasses work across the intersecting areas of performance studies, queer studies, and modern and contemporary art. Much of my work concerns a rethinking of the value of objects, events and knowledges deemed unworthy by so-called serious discourses of criticism and scholarship, with a view to paying heed to their alternative economies of cultural engagement and pleasure. Moreover, what I’m interested in is a reappraisal of devalued cultural phenomena through a perverse re-embodiment of the categories of judgement, rather than any more straightforwardly positive critical recuperation. Currently I am working on a new book project on ideas of cultural seriousness and queer art / performance which includes work on contemporary performers David Hoyle, Oreet Ashery, Kiki and Herb, and Bird La Bird, alongside artists and filmmakers Joe Brainard and Shirley Clarke. This is a continuation in some ways of my earlier monograph on gossip and homosexuality in the New York art world (Between You and Me, 2005) which explored the role of unofficial testimony in the production of queer art history. My edited collection After Criticism (2004) brought together writings by contemporary artists and academics which variously foregrounded the creative and performative possibilities of critical response.

I am also currently co-director of Performance Matters www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk , a three-year creative research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Bringing together artists, curators and academics to investigate the cultural value of performance, the project is a collaboration between Goldsmiths, Roehampton University and the Live Art Development Agency. The project is co-directed by myself, Prof. Adrian Heathfield of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton and Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency.

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