MA Contemporary Art Theory

The core module strands introduce you to the problematic that resides at the heart of the MA programme: how to explore the relations between critical theory and contemporary visual arts practices. You choose either A and C or B and D. They present differently articulated contemporary perspectives on ‘art’ and ‘theory’ drawn from a variety of traditions (e.g. The Frankfurt School, Post-structuralism, Performance Studies, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis and Post-Colonial Studies). The core module strands are supported by student-led Reading Groups.

What is a suitable ethical position today? What cause should a curator support? What can philosophy do to address and/or support these ethical decisions? This course explores the act of taking on an ethical position in curatorial projects today. The material explored ranges from specific curatorial practices that have developed means of addressing ethical issues to philosophical engagements in ethics.

Authors studied are taken from both Western and non-Western traditions and range from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Valentin Mudimbe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, and Timothy Morton.

The visual work explored on this course mainly consists of key exhibitions that have defined the way art engages itself ethically. These include: Dada ist Politisch, When Attitudes Become Form, Inside the Visible, Making Things Public, Altermodern, etc. Teaching involves lectures, student presentations, and discussions of key art historical and philosophical texts.

Over the past few years, novel modes of interaction and collaboration have been sweeping through economic, political and social life: peer-to-peer platforms, time banks, co-working communities, alternative currencies, self-managed spaces, digital commons and crowdsourcing schemes. The module investigates the relationship between these developments and contemporary art practices. Artistic experiments with alternative forms of funding, production and distribution are not only shaking up the roles of creators, audiences, institutions and the art market but have also begun to spearhead a new culture of operations, in which citizens become enlisted in the self-servicing of the social, cultural and infrastructural fabric of societies. These processes raise critical questions about issues of access and technology, global inequality and citizenship arrangements.

In this module, we will discuss these questions by considering the ways in which art and culture are enlisted in shaping new public experiences, attitudes and expectations. The public of these new “data publics” is a multi-faced figure. In that it is implicated in its own generation, conventional political paradigms such as the protection of rights or the division and demarcation of powers fall short when it comes to engaging the dynamic realities of the hybridised analogue-digital realm. Departing from this much more active participation of today’s populations in the shaping of new public spheres, we will discuss the political implications of environments, in which individual, commercial and governmental agendas and actions become increasingly blurred.

Research as Intervention – We will explore this changing relationship between art and politics by way of capturing the transformative capacity of new modes of artistic engagement, new “commons” for collective action and new social and political climates. Producing individual case studies, we will trace, map and analyse specific cultural, temporal, geographic and systemic dimensions of the changing ways in which art practices are embedded in today’s socio-economic environments. Addressing the global scope of these changes, we will engage with discourses on globalisation, social and political movements, technological restructuring, contemporary public culture and creative economies. Drawing on the individual case studies, this module will conclude with a collectively organised public event.

This module considers the impact of performativity on contemporary art practice since 1960, starting with performance art engaging with the everyday, moving through appropriation practices of the 1980s and ending with projects that use re-enactment and fiction to re-imagine histories and possible futures in contemporary artworks. In doing so, the module will discuss differences between ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’, drawing on theoretical perspectives from post-structural theory, queer and feminist studies, art theory, and philosophy. Throughout the module, performativity will be explored as a way of expressing the psychic and political potential of performance in art: a way of thinking about what art does. The focus will be on artwork drawing on feminist and queer politics. Theorists discussed include Erving Goffman, J L Austin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière.

This module asks how animal and sexual differences matter in and through a range of contemporary art, films and literature. Recent years have shown a surge of interest in what Jacques Derrida names ‘the animal question,’ ie the philosophical tendency to divide ‘man’ from ‘animal’ and for this difference to support a ‘non-criminal putting to death’ of the latter. This module investigates the ‘logics’ that create this critical division while also addressing what is a frequent gap in critical animal studies: the interface with gender and sexuality. Thus this module will also interweave study of works by feminist thinkers (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway, Kelly Oliver) to bring the problematic ways that ‘the feminine’ is figured in relation to both ‘the animal’ and to a supposedly neutral and human ‘subject’ into view. It will also consider how the sexual locates a key intersection with species and may open paths to new ones. Thus the module points towards what some now call the ‘posthumanities’.

This course engages with questions of memory, placing particular emphasis on the encounter of different histories and recollections between and across cultures. Drawing on a variety of art works, exhibitions, films, literary texts and theoretical models, the course explores spaces in which memories neither compete with nor erase each other, but interact in productive and unforeseen ways.

We shall read some of the historical texts that are crucial to the emergence of the field of memory studies: texts that have taught us to think of memory as being shaped by the social milieu in which the subject lives (Maurice Halbwachs), to regard memory as a performative process that might be concerned with the past, but is enacted in the present (Pierre Nora) and to comprehend the long-term effects of trauma (Sigmund Freud). By studying these works together with writings by the contemporary generation of memory scholars (Michael Rothberg, Astrid Erll, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch and others), we shall also probe their limitations, thereby considering the shift from ‘cultural’ to ‘transcultural’ memory studies.

This module engages with an expanded notion of the geographic, specifically the shift from classical post-colonial geography to issues of cartography. Drawing on key theoretical texts and the works of spatial practitioners (contemporary artists, architects, curators, activists and others in the fields of the humanities), it explores such issues as urbanity, globalisation, mobility, conflict, migration and human rights. In addition, it asks how, within the heterogeneous geographic discourses and practices in circulation today, not only knowledge and cultural production but also identities and new forms of subjectivity, are ‘spatialised’.

Explore our online archive of student work from Geographies

The Ocean as Archive explores several interdisciplinary approaches to reading the water. It starts by examining discourses on the "watery Anthropocene". Spurred by this crisis it considers other ways of reading the water: materially through oceanographic studies of watery depths and strata, and marine life therein; and temporally by considering the ocean as a speculative site, and as a space of residues. This module also explores alternate ways of reading this crisis: through non-western (Pacific Island, West African) maritime epistemologies and myths, through discourses on migration (both contemporary and historical), through the mobilisation of the image of water in critical theory, in literature, in music and in art.

The class examines the site of the ocean not with the aim to systematically plumb its depths so to speak, but rather sees the ocean as a laboratory with which to examine multiple and often contradictory approaches when taking to the sea. As a result, a key summative assignment is a creative journal, which is intended as a site to explore critical experimental approaches to interdisciplinary ways of knowing, which the crisis of the watery Anthropocene urgently demands.

The Ocean as Archive considers methods with which we can begin to understand what is at stake in articulating the visual cultures of the sea. These methods are practice-led and are aimed at students interested in exploring experimental methods in their critical work. Its thematics resonate with concerns raised by Geopolitics, Conceptual Ecologies, Conflicts and Negotiations, and Spatial Biopolitics in the MA Contemporary Art Theory offerings.

This module explores the interrelationship between power and subjectivity with a particular focus on the question of ‘psychopower’. The problematic of ‘psychopower’ (as proposed, in varying terminologies, by Bernard Stiegler and others) signals that more than ever, and in pervasive ways, power relations today draw on subjective capacities and specifically operate on capacities of the subject which are constitutive of its psychic life: attention, care, concern, desire, the capacity to relate to others, anxiety, guilt, etc. As a result, new forms of ‘dispossession’ and suffering have emerged which require a new critical language informed by various disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, media theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of contemporary labour relations. Moreover, the problematic of psychopower intersects with new regimes of visuality and a new aesthetics, and is thus crucial for an understanding of various contemporary art practices.

The module is divided in three main parts: The first part (Autumn term, weeks 6–11) focuses on recent critical analyses revolving mainly around questions of contemporary labour relations, shifting regimes of visuality, and the role of communicative technologies in contemporary forms of production and consumption (Berardi, Terranova, Dean, Chun, Galloway, Stiegler). The second part (Spring term, weeks 1–5) engages with a number of classical philosophical and psychoanalytic theorizations of constitutive subjective capacities, in order to proceed to more recent discussions of the psychic and affectivity (Husserl, Levinas, Klein, Winnicott, Bion; Kristeva, Ahmed, Malabou). The third and final part (Spring tem, weeks 6–11) focuses on theories of power relations and resistance which specifically highlight the role of subjectivity in its both passive and active capacities (Foucault, Butler, Guattari, Massumi, Institute for Precarious Consciousness, Precarias a la deriva).

Blackness, which is to say black radicalism, is not the property of black people. All that we have (and are) is what we hold in our outstretched hands. This open collective being is blackness – (racial) difference mobilized against the racist determinations it calls into being.

Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful”

Black Aesthetic Theory is designed to test possible ways of thinking the relationship between black radicalism and the aesthetics of blackness in our contemporary moment. Thinking such a relation will rely on tuning into experimental tendencies in electronic music, visual art, writing and cinema through which several artists assemble new iterations of black aesthetics. We shall also engage in close readings of new speculative theorisations of the concept of blackness in the field of Black Studies. Two central premises shape the content of this module. One, taken from Cedric Robinson, is that black radicalism enacts a virulent critique of western civilisation. The other is Fred Moten’s extension of Robinson through the claim that black radicalism’s critique of western civilisation is operative in black art as the open and generative production of blackness. Taking these formulations as starting points, we will listen, watch, read and think together in order to address the question of the relationship between black radicalism and blackness within our current horizon. As such, Black Aesthetic Theory is open to anyone who is interested in exploring black radicalism and/or the concept of blackness as a means for dissolving the accursed complexes of the west.

Having already produced an assessed oral presentation on your topic (see above) you work on your dissertation over the summer and submit your completed project for assessment early in September.

Assessment: one 12-15,000-word dissertation.