Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Wood Roberdeau

Academic qualifications

PhD, (Un)familiarities: Remobilizing the Poetry of the Real, Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, 2008

My thesis questions the efficacy of the historical avant-garde, considers the evacuation of the authorial artist, the phenomenology of the everyday and its legibility thanks to contemporary artworks, and tests the old binary of aesthetics versus politics.  Pierre Restany’s Nouveau Réaliste Weltanschauung provides the foundation from which I explore these various trajectories, as he argues an inherent potential for art objects to inform the quotidian under particular conditions of production and reception.

MA, Contemporary Art, Sotheby's Institute of Art, 2002

BA, French Literature, Colorado College, 1999

Teaching

Contemporary Art Worlds: International Foundation Certificate Pathway, visiting students, year 0

Introduction to Art History: BA (Hons) History of Art or Fine Art and History of Art, year 1

London Art Worlds: BA (Hons) visiting students, year 2

Postmodernities: BA (Hons) History of Art or Fine Art and History of Art, years 2 and 3; Graduate Diploma in Contemporary Art History

Professional activities

Curatorial (Museum), 2002-2004

Exhibitions and Administration (Kunsthalle), 1999-2001

Member, Association of Art Historians

Papers presented

'Postmodern Aporias, Bergsonian Optimism, and Intuitive Gestures in Contemporary Sculpture and Installation', at Bergson and His Postmodern and Immanent Legacies, The Courtauld Institute of Art, February, 2011

Research interests

Visual art practices are often compared and contrasted with an aesthetics of 'everyday life' - I am interested in locating and considering early attempts at reconciling these two camps and assessing their seemingly paradoxical relationship. I also study contemporary reconfigurations of the ready-made in terms of relationality and domesticity, promises of sociological becomings, and threats to creativity in the aftermath of the simulacrum, or, modernism's rearticulation following theories of the postmodern. In short, I am intrigued by predetermined limits of the poetic as it pertains to the activation of art.

Selected publications

Journals

'Developing the Negative - Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory by Gail Day', book review, Philosophy of Photography, vol. 2, no. 1, autumn 2011

'Affirming Difference: Everyday Aesthetic Experience after Phenomenology', Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 9, 2011

'Immanence as Aesthetic Documentation', rubric: document, issue 3, spring 2010

'Ordinary Origins: Encountering Others Encountering Objects', rubric: nascent, issue 1, autumn 2009

Exhibition Catalogues

'Happiness Is Closer than You Think', in The Pursuit of Happiness, Arsenal City
Gallery, Poznan, Poland, 2010

'Untitled, 1982-1983', 'Biography', in Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art: Yale University Press, 2004

‘Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #398’, in Dallas Museum of Art: 100 Years, Dallas Museum of Art, 2003

‘Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled’, in Dallas Museum of Art: 100 Years, Dallas Museum of Art, 2003

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Talo/The House, exhibition guide, Dallas Museum of Art, 2002

Mona Hatoum, Roni Horn, Teresita Fernández, exhibition youth guide, SITE Santa Fe, 2000