Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Gavin Butt

Co-director of Performance Matters, a three-year creative research project on the cultural value of performance

Teaching

Until 2012 my teaching is concentrated on PhD supervision and the PhD seminar in Visual Cultures.

Areas of supervision

I have recently supervised dissertations on injury and queer performance; performative approaches to Central and East European action art; shame and commemorative practice in contemporary British art; and real-time media and contemporary art. I currently supervise projects on televisual documentary and transgender lives; embarrassment and contemporary art; ‘auxiliary’ queer performance; the concept of ‘altervalue’ in performance art; re-enactment and feminist art; the concept of lack in queer live art and club performance; and incoherent subjectivity and the creative process. I welcome proposals for research on any aspect of queer art and performance since 1945; non-serious or purportedly trivial forms of performance; live art and performance art; official and unofficial archives and testimonies; queer theory and performance theory; and contemporary art and the politics of performativity.

Research interests

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, 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.

Selected publications

Books:

Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963, Duke University Press, 2005

(Edited) After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Blackwell, 2004 (Chinese edition, Jiangsu Fine Arts, Nanjing 2009).
Selected articles:

‘Hoyle’s Humility’, (interview with David Hoyle), in Dance Theatre Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2008, pp. 30-34.

‘Should We Take Performance Seriously?’, in Oreet Ashery, Dancing with Men, Live Art Development Agency, 2009.

‘How I Died For Kiki and Herb’, in Henry Rogers (ed.), The Art of Queering in Art, Article Press, 2007, pp. 85-94.

‘Stop that Acting! Performance and Authenticity in Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason’, in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, MIT Press / InIVA, 2007, pp. 36-55.

‘Joe Brainard’s Queer Seriousness, or, How to Make Fun Out of the Avant-Garde’, in David Hopkins (ed.), Mapping The Neo-Avant-Garde, Rodopi Press, New York and Amsterdam, 2006, pp. 277-297.

‘Scholarly Flirtations’, in Angelika Nollert, Irit Rogoff, Bart de Baere, Yilmaz Dziewior, Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann und Dieter Roelstraete (eds.), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y, Revolver 2006, pp. 187-192.

‘You Cannot Be Serious?’, essay accompanying Wild Gift exhibition, 25-29 May 2006.

‘America and its Discontents: Art and Politics 1945-1960’, in Amelia Jones (ed.), Contemporary Art (Since 1945), Blackwell, 2006.

‘Avant-Garde et Chic: Andy Warhol et la fabrique du dandy Américain’ in Matthias Waschek and Veerle Thielemans (eds.), L’Art Américain: Identités d’une Nation, Louvre/Terra Foundation, 2005, pp. 142-157.

‘How New York Queered the Idea of Modern Art’, in Paul Wood (ed.), Varieties of Modernism, Open University/Yale University Press, 2004.

‘Happenings in History, or, The Epistemology of the Memoir’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2001, pp. 113-126.

(with Jon Cairns), ‘Steve Reinke’s Archival Imaginary’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3, Autumn 2000, pp. 93-101. Also on the Peer website.

(with Jon Cairns), ‘The Art of Trailing: work-seth/tallentire’s Dublin’, Third Text, No. 48, winter 1999, pp. 81-88.

‘The Greatest Homosexual? Camp Pleasure and the Performative Body of Larry Rivers’, in Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (eds.), Performing the Body/ Performing the Text, Routledge, 1999, pp. 107-126.

Grants & awards

• AHRB Research Leave Scheme 2000-2001
• AHRB Small Grant in the Creative and Performing Arts 2002
• AHRC Research Leave Scheme 2006
• AHRC Research Grant ‘Performance Matters’ 2009-2012