Goldsmiths - University of London

Adrian Rifkin

Currently I am working on a book length text provisionally titled Losing myself. This is a series of engagements with and against the autobiographical as the figure of an archive - whether historical, theoretical or imaginary. Each section will be an attempt to map or interrogate moments of my own life against their determinants, conditions or outcome, but in such a way as to secure diffusion rather than focus, dispersal against coherence and logic, complex series of uncontrollable ‘events’ rather than sensible narratives. In doing this I want to explore how what we call cultural theory becomes possible in a description of living, but as if living is not what belongs to me. The essay Chreographesis on my web site is a draft for a little of this work.

Academic qualifications

1966 – 1971 Postgraduate Studies, Universities of Manchester and Leeds, completing PhD on ‘Ingres and Academic Discourse’.
1963 – 1966 Oxford University, (PPE)
1956 – 1962 Manchester Grammar School

Teaching

1970s. Participated in the development of the BA programmes in Social History and in Cultural Studies and Portsmouth Polytechnic throughout the 1970s, innovative interdisciplinary courses, of which CS was the first of its kind. Developed new models of the syllabus for the Social History of Art that became internationally recognised.

1980s
New BA programme with Design History and Theory constituted as studio based disciplines, Portsmouth Polytechnic.

1990s.
Wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Leeds University in Film, Theories of the Subject, and particularly redeveloped the role of Visual Culture as a primary link between Studio and Art History students. Worked with Dana Arnold in development of innovative MA in Country House Studies and established PhD programme in Fine Art Practice with support of the Stanley Burton Foundation.(500k)

2000 –
reconstituted MA Visual Culture at Middlesex University , rebuilding common courses with MA Fine Art ,and from 2004 onwards totally rebuilt undergraduate theory programmes for BA Fine Art students via innovative research based and interactive, electronic models of presentation and assessment.

2003
I participated in the formulation of the RESKIN programme of PhD training for art history candidates in the University of London, and remain an active participant after giving the opening address in the first two years. Also I developed the queer theory theme for MRes at IGRS.

Areas of supervision

Currently supervising(3) or co-supervising(3) PhDs with subjects including film and film education, the sublime and contemporary British art, Laughter and text in Wagner’s Parsifal and the Architectural Specification as Text and Theoretical model, curating as contemporary cultural practice, and Cuban Visual Culture. My cohort of some 10 Leeds PhDs have in their majority gone on to occupy significant posts in the British University system working in subjects as diverse and contemporary queer art and art history, sound and architecture, cinema(Lynch), theories and histories of Cultural Studies, Photography History and Theory etc.

Professional activities

1999 – 2007 Professor of Visual Culture: Middlesex University
1992 – 1999 Professor of Fine Art: University of Leeds
1995, April: Frehling Visiting Professor in the Humanities, Centre for the Humanities, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
1994, 1995, 1997 – Visiting Professor in Graduate School, Department of Video, School of the Art Institute, Chicago.
1998 MA Theory course tutor at Architectural Association
1970 – 1992 Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, in Fine Art and then Design, Portsmouth Polytechnic.
1978 Visiting Lecturer in Art History, University of East Anglia

Professional Posts And Memberships
Editor and then co-editor of Art History, 1997 – 2002
Founder and Editorial board member of Parallax, 1994 onwards.
Editorial board member Journal of Visual Culture
RAE Panellist for Art Architecture and Design, 1996 and 2001
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Member of International Advisory Council of the Research Forum of the Courtauld Institute of Art
Member of the Board of Management of the Institute of German and Romance
Studies and member of IGRS MRes teaching team.
Founder member of the Board of the Raphael Samuel Centre for Social History (until 2005)

External: (since 2000)

PhD examinations Université de Paris Vlll, University of Queensland, UCL London, Birkbeck, London, University of Leeds, Courtauld Institute, Royal College of Art, Kingston University.

Consultancy: (since 2000)

Departmental Reviews and Course Reviews, Universities of Kent, Reading and Essex and Goldsmiths(Fine Art/Theory degree)
Advisor to inaugural editorial group of AA Papers.

Tenure reviews: (since 2000)

professorial appointment letters and other senior appointments for Universities in USA including Duke, Michigan at Ann Arbor, Yale, Santa Barbara, Rice.

Two professorial appointment committees at Goldsmiths.

Conferences

Frankfurt University, Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, 2000, 7 – 8 July: participant in Theory Programme,
Borderline States, conference conceived by Renate Salecl, paper entitled ‘Mattia Preti and the Promises of Pain’.
Getty/Clark study conferences on Art History and Biography October 2002(Williams) and January 2003, Getty, contributor and respondent. Speaking on ‘Kracauer, Offenbach and artist’s lives in critical theory.’
CRASSH Cambridge, conference on Biography, March 2003, final plenary respondent.
University of Chicago, Classics Department, April 2004, International conference on Ekphrasis, paper entitled ‘Addressing Ekphrasis’.
Kings College London, Queer Matters Conference 28 – 30 May 2004, Opening Plenary address (with Mandy Merck), ‘Confessions of a Gay Lacanian.’
Zurich University, Departments of Architecture and Art History, international conference on the theme of Waste Land, January 19 2006, closing plenary paper entitled ‘La friche (à) venir.’
Musée du Louvre, March 2006, contributor to cycle of lectures around the major Ingres exhibition, paper entitled ‘Les mensonges d’Ingres.’
University of Leeds Centre CATH, regular contributor including contributions to the preparatory round tables for Translating Class, 2001 on the languages of the paris Commune: Indexicality and Virtuality, 2005, on video art and Cabbalistic theories of materiality, and: Congress Cath 2003, Warp: Woof, Aurality, Textuality, Musicality, opening plenary, ‘Seeking Siegfried or thoughts on saving Teddy’.
Institute of German and Romance Studies, June 2006, contributor to series of lectures on World Cities, paper entitled ‘Bayreuth, provincial village or global denkmal’.
Tate Modern and Tate Britain: regular appearances either lecturing, chairing or participant in conversations, including conversation with Michael Nyman,(2003) (with Kay Dickinson): Julia Kristeva (2003): with Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois(2005, with Mignon Nixon): on Fiction and Contemporary Art(2005):with Narcus du Sautoy, Cornelia Parker and others, on Science and Art(2006). Conferences included Sade and Surrealism, Tate Modern (2001), Encounter, Curiosity, the Making of Practice, Tate Britain, (October 2006.)
Photographers Gallery, London: Regular invitations to chair events or engage in conversations, including Andres Serrano,(2002) and Renate Salecl (2004).
Dublin Project: February 2006 public lecture on the exhibition of General Idea curated by Paul O’Neill and Grant Watson
MuKHA Antwerp: April 2007, public conversation with Sudeep Dasgupta,(OVA, Holland) in the series devoted to redefinitions of ‘culture’

Selected publications

Books

Single Authored:
Street Noises, Parisian Pleasure 1900 – 1940, Manchester, 1993.
Ingres then, and now, London 2000. www.gai-savoir.net
This website contains the bulk of my current work in progress, including the draft of an on-line book using the internet as a driver of multiple forms of scholarship and address, as well as experimental pieces, art criticism, PDFs of old work and links.

Edited:
Voices of the People, the Social Life of La Sociale at the end of the Second Empire, with Roger Thomas, London, Routledge, 1987.
About Michael Baxandall, London, Blackwell, 1999
Fingering Ingres, with Susan Siegfried, London, Blackwell, 2001
Other Objects of Desire, Collectors and Collecting Queerly, with Michael Camille, London, Blackwell, 2001, including postface ‘Collecting Men, or my Next Duchess’, pp. 150 – 155.

Articles in Journals and Books. (not including reviews)

Before 1985:
Cultural Movement and the Paris Commune. (Art History, 1979)
Can Gramsci save Art History? (Block, 1981)
Ingres and the Academic Dictionary(Art History, 1983)
No Particular Thing to Mean(Block)
Well-formed Phrases(Oxford Art Journal)
A Down on the Upbeat. Adorno, Benjamin and the Jazz Question(Block).

From 1985:
Les écoles anglaises du dessin: un succès contradictoire in Révoltes Logiques,
Esthétiques du peuple, Paris, La Découverte, 1985, pp. 113 – 129.
Art’s Histories in The New Art History, edited by A. L. Rees and F. Borzello, London, 1986, pp. 157 – 163
Musical Moments in Yale French Studies Number 73, ‘Everyday Life’, 1987, pp. 121 – 155.
Carmenology in New Formations, Number 5 (1988), pp. 91-107
Success Disavowed: the Schools of Design in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.(an Allegory) in Journal of Design History, Volume 1 Number 2, 1988, pp. 89 – 102 (revised English language version of Les écoles…supra)
The long run of modernity, or an essay on post-dating, in Postmodernism and the re-reading of modernity, eds. Francis Barker et al, Manchester 1992, pp. 66 – 83.
Un Effet David ? les mots de l'art et le statut de l'artiste in Michel, Regis (Réd.): David contre David. 2 Tom. [Conférences et colloques du Louvre] Paris 1993.
History, Time and the Morphology of Critical Language, or Publicola’s Choice, in Art criticism and its institutions in nineteenth-century France, edited by Michael Orwicz, Manchester, 1994 (revised English version of above)
Travel for Men: from Claude Lévi-Strauss to the Sailor Hans in Travellers Tales, Narratives of Home and Displacement, edited by George Robertson et al, London, 1994, pp. 216 – 224
Parvenu or Palimpsest: Some Tracings of the Jew in Modern France in The Jew in the Text, Modernity and the Construction of Identity, edited by Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, London Thames and Hudson, 1995, pp. 176 - 191
Bitte nicht beruhren - Tom mit Sebastiano, Kant und anderen. in Texte zur Kunst, Volume V, no. 17, Feb. 1995, 137-47
Total Ellipsis: Zola, Benjamin and the Dialectics of Kitsch in parallax Volume 1 Number 2, 1996, pp. 101 – 113.
Reading the Sexual for Something Else in Museum of Modern Art Papers, Volume One Louise Bourgeois, edited by Ian Cole, Oxford 1996, pp. 31 - 36
Theory as a Place in The Art Bulletin, June 1996, pp. 209 - 212
The Poetics of Space Rewritten from Renaud Camus to the Gay City Guide in Parisian Fields, edited by Michael Sheringham, Reaktion, London, 1996,
pp. 133 – 149
Slavery/Sublimity in the eight technologies of otherness, editor-author Sue Golding, Routledge, London1997, pp. 145 – 151.
Putting-off, the Painter’s Tense & some speculations on Gay Time in parallax, Volume 5, Number 1, 1999, pp. 103 – 119.
A space between: on Gérard Fromanger, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and some others, in Photogenic Painting – Gérard Fromager, edited by Sarah Wilson, Black Dog, London 1999, pp. 21 – 60.
Benjamin’s Paris, Freud’s Rome, Whose London? In The Metropolis and the Image, Constructing Identities for London c. 1750 – 1950, edited by Dana Arnold, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, pp. 153 – 166.
Sexual Anaphora: a Methodological Daydream in umbr(a) – a journal of the unconscious, 2000, pp. 87 – 95.
A Roman Holiday in parallax Number 25, 2002, pp. 4 – 7.
Gay Paris, Trace and Ruin in The hieroglyphics of space, reading and experiencing the modern metropolis, edited by Neil Leach, Routledge, London 2002, pp. 125 – 135. (published in earlier forms in Australian Journal of French Studies, 1998 and Renaissance and Modern Studies, 1997)
‘Eyes Wide Shut’, some Considerations on Thought and Art, in Art and Thought edited by Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, pp. 197 – 208.
Waiting and Seeing in Journal of visual culture, Volume 2, Number 3, 2003,
pp. 325 – 339.
Il y a des mots qu’on souhaiterait plus lire in Paragraph, Volume 28 Number 1, March 2005, ‘Jacques Rancière’, edited by Mark Robson, pp.
From Structure to Enigma, and Back, Perhaps: Journal of visual Culture, Volume 4, Number 3, December 2005, pp 365 – 381
Americans go home, which is more American, Paris-Texas or Paris-France? in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2004, Volume 8, Number 3, ‘France-USA’ edited by Kristin Ross, pp. 259 – 272.
Some Thoughts on Iraq, after many years, in
JR Cinéphile in La philosophie déplacée, Autour de Jacques Rancière, Horlieu Éditions 2006, pp. 371 – 378.
Wotan Envy in parallax 41, 2006, ‘Textual Soundings’ edited by Barbara Engh, pp. 26 – 49.
Addressing Ekphrasis, or a prolegomena to the next, in The Journal of Classical Philology, Number 100, 2007, pp. **-**

Writings With Artists (Selection)
Respicit Orpheus… in Drawing Papers 24, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, the Eurydice Series, New York, 2001, pp. 19 – 26.
In Shaheen Merali, Black Pop, 2004, essay on Merali’s video ‘Dark Matter’.
In Roxy Walsh, Felix Culpa, 2006, ‘Roxy’s Words.’
In Infallible, in search of the real George Eliot, 2005, edited by Roxy Walsh, writing as Davida Pendleton, A Short Story by Davida Pendleton, p. 113 ff.
In Navigating the Unknown. The creative process in contemporary performing arts, London, 2006, edited by Christopher Bannerman, Joshua Sofaer, Jane Watt, p. 120 ff., writing as Davida Pendleton.
For Eny and Sibel Ozturk, Brussels installation for German EU Presidency, forthcoming.

Interviews
In l’Écrit voir, 1985. With John Baldessari in Versus
In Interrogating Cultural Studies, Theory, Politics and |Practice, edited by Paul Bowman, London, 2003, pp. 101 – 124.

Radio
Between 1987 and 1990 I made 11 short experimental broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 concerning sound and the city ( City of Light), sound and vision (Snapshots for Ever) and listening and literature (Short play on Flaubert and Bovary).