Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Jean-Paul Martinon

Teaching

I currently co-run the BA Fine Art and History of Art Programme and the PhD Curatorial / Knowledge Programme. I also teach a BA course: ‘Museums and Galleries: Framing Art’.

Areas of supervision

I have recently supervised dissertations on Derrida’s work (his relationship with negative theology, his concept of the archive, and on issues relating to temporality and the messianic). With regards to philosophy, I welcome proposals for research on any aspect of deconstruction and ethics. With regards to contemporary visual art practices, I welcome proposals for research on any aspects of the history and theory of museums and exhibition practices.

Research interests

After completing a master’s degree in International Law in Paris, I moved to London in the late 80s. Very quickly and with no previous experience or training, I found myself curating exhibitions of contemporary art. In 1991 I co-founded Rear Window, an independent arts trust that staged a series of exhibitions and conferences in temporary sites across London throughout the 90s. Each projects presented, outside the conventions of the gallery space (in and around different frames, themes, media, and locations), new or collaborative work by young or established contemporary artists, writers, and poets. One such project, Care and Control (1995), was sited in a fully functioning psychiatric hospital in East London and involved 30 psychiatric patients and 18 contemporary artists. It is in the context of this project that I completed my first monograph, a social history of Hackney Workhouse, Swelling Grounds, 1995. I stopped curating exhibitions by the end of the millennium and started working in academia, completing a PhD in contemporary art theory in 2001. Over the years, I have slowly developed an interest in philosophy and specifically in the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. This interest led me to complete a second monograph, On Futurity / Malabou, Nancy & Derrida (2007), which comprises a series of essays on the notion of futurity in contemporary continental philosophy. Currently, I am working on a new book project exploring the ways in which Derrida interprets Levinas’s use of the biblical commandment, “You Shall Not Kill.” The idea for this new work originated (and concerns itself) with the biblical command subliminally imbedded in the exhibition commemorating the Rwandan Genocide in Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali.

Selected publications

Books:

On Futurity, Malabou, Nancy, and Derrida, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007

Swelling Grounds, Rear Window, 1995

Selected articles:

'On Hodge’s Humanly Impossible Ontological Fulfillment,’ in Radical Philosophy, Routledge, 2008.

‘33, 34, 35… The Life of The Limits,’ in Josef Steiff & Tristan Tamplin (eds), Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, Open Court, 2008.

“Museum, Plasticity, Temporality,’ in Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 2006, pp. 157-67.

‘Strategies of (In)visibility’, in EIPCP Web Journal, 2005, pp. 1-6.

‘Grafts, Repetitions & Polymorphous Bodies” in Daniel Buren 3°W, The Wordsworth Trust, 2005, pp. 29-44.

‘Museum and Restlessness’ in Hugh Genoways (ed), Museum Philosophy for the 21st Century, Alta Mira Press, 2005, pp. 59-69.

‘Changing an Opinion,’ in Jean-Paul Martinon and Kirsty Ogg (eds), To Change an Opinion: Art and the 'New' World Disorder, The Showroom and Cornerhouse, 2004, pp. 26-9.

‘Fact or Fiction?' in Adrian George (ed), Art, Lies and Videotape, Tate, 2003, pp. 40-51.

‘Capturing the Present?,’ in Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2002, pp. 374-7.