BLAKE
STIMSON
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Department
of Art History
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Email
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Education |
Ph.D., 1998, Art History, Cornell University |
M.F.A., 1992, Sculpture, Tufts University and the School
of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
Fellow, 1990-91, Studio Art, Whitney Independent Study
Program, New York |
B.A., 1982, Religious Studies,
Middlebury College |
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Selected recent interviews, surveys,
questionnaires, blog posts, symposia, responses |
The
Triumphant Middle, Brooklyn Rail, (October 2018) |
Review
of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the
Test, Art Institute of Chicago (October 2018) |
Art
and Social Death, Fertile Ground (New York: A Blade of
Grass, 2018) |
Lean
In, The Statue, Plot (March 2017) |
On
Yates McKee's Strike Art e-flux.com (April 2016) |
For
an art history of there there (proposed vision
statement for new Mellon-funded midwestern art journal There
There) (February 2016) |
For
enlightenment, Nonsite.org (August 2015) |
What
was Humanism?, Either/And.org (May 2013) |
Institutionality,
Occupy as Form working session, UC Berkeley (February 2012)
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Out
in Public: Natalie Bookchin in Conversation with Blake
Stimson, Rhizome and Video
Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube (March
2011) |
Why
I am a Humanist, POV@DHI (January 2010) |
Is
Photography Over?, SFMoMA (April 2010) |
Photography
and Ontology, Philosophy of Photography (March 2010)
See marginal quality video of this paper given as a lecture
here. |
Photography
and Philosophy, UC Davis (February 2010) |
Questionnaire
on "The Contemporary," October 130 (Fall 2009) |
The
Photography of the social forms. Interview with Blake
Stimson, Ag (Winter 2007) |
Former
Fellow: Blake Stimson, CAA News (July 2006) |
Survey:
The State of Art History, Texte zur Kunst (June 2006)
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Selected recent talks |
“Big Data and Little Data,” Clark Art Institute, 2019 |
“Kant After All,” CAA, 2019 |
“The One True Form,” ASAP, October 2018 |
“The Art of State,” ASAP, October 2018 |
“Public Photography,” Capitalism and the Camera,
University of Toronto, May 2018 |
“Vito Acconci and You,” Art History Department, University
of California, Irvine, January 2018 |
Opening remarks, The Withering of the State?, UIC, March
2018 |
“On Clowning,” Association for the Study of the Arts of
the Present, Oakland, CA, October 2017 |
“Art and Social Death,” CAA, February 2017 |
"Seeing
like a State," UIC Institute for the Humanities,
November 2016 |
"The Human Thing / Paul Strand as Jew," LCSL Summer
Seminar, UIC, May 2016 |
"Paul Strand as Jew," Cameras
in Turmoil: the Apparatus of Visual Reproduction in Japan
and America, 1960-1975, Harvard University, December
2015. |
"On Chromophilia and Chromophobia /
Paul Strand as Jew," The
Colors of Photography, University of Zurich, October
2015. |
"Allan
Sekula and Paul Strand," Lewis & Clark College,
2015. |
"Pacioli and Paolini," Giulio Paolini and Conceptual Art,
Art Institute of Chicago, 2015. |
"In Defense of Genius," San Francisco Art Institute,
October 2014. |
"Photographic Communism," Under
the Sign of Amadeo, Lisbon, November 2013 and
Historical Materialism, London, November 2013. |
"Photographic Communism," keynote address, Histories/Photographies,
DePaul University, Chicago, October 2013. |
"Photography and God," keynote address, Retracing
America: Modernism After Paul Strand, University
College London, 2013; Experimental settings: digital
audiovisual culture, School of Communication and the Arts,
University of São Paulo, Brazil, 2013. |
"Love Anger Depression
Abstraction," The Renaissance Society, University of
Chicago, 2013 |
"The Enclosure of Contemporary Art," keynote address, New
Institutions: 5th Annual UC San Diego Visual Art Graduate
Student Conference, UCSD, 2012; Townshend
Working Group in Contemporary Art, UC Berkeley, 2012;
Special
Series in Modern and Contemporary Art, University of
Illinois, Chicago, 2012; and for the Graduate
Group in Religion at UC Davis, 2012. |
"The Burden and the Promise of Photographic Form,"
keynote address, Coloquio
Internacional de la Bienal de Fotografía de Lima,
Lima, Peru, 2012 |
"Photography and Transubstantiation," keynote address, International
Workshop: Viewing and Reading the Photographs of The
Family of Man, Durham Centre for Advanced Photographic
Studies, Durham University, 2011 |
"Workerism, Darkness, and Light," Dark
Matter of the Art World (in conjunction with the
publication of Gregory Sholette’s Dark
Matter [Pluto Press, 2011]), CAA annual conference,
New York, 2011 |
"The Interior of Art," keynote address, Traffic:
Conceptual Art in Canada, University of Toronto, 2010;
and Centre
for Art and Design Research and Experimentation at the
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhamption, England,
2010. |
"Methodological Hospitality," keynote address, Transmission:
Hospitality, launch conference for Transmission Annual,
Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield UK, 2010; Photography
and Philosophy, conference organized by Blake Stimson
and Gerhard Richter, UC Davis, 2010 |
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Recent seminars |
Does Critique Need Taste? (Spring 2019) |
Photography and Barbarism (taught with Walter Benn
Michaels Spring 2018) |
Adorno (taught with Lisa Lee Fall 2015) |
Homo
Faber (Spring 2014)
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Aesthetic Theory
(Fall 2013) |
Meaning
in the Visual Arts: Historiography of the Visual Arts,
1750 to 1960 (Fall 2013) |
Toward
New Histories of the Visual Arts: 1960 to the Present
(Spring 2013) |
Erotic Love, Platonic Love, Christian Love,
Political Love (Winter 2012) |
Technology and Affect (Fall 2011) |
Art History as a Humanistic Discipline (Winter
2011) |
Public Higher Ed at the Crossroads (Winter
2010) |
The Theory of Good Taste (Winter 2010) |
God, Vision, Art, Thought, Society (Fall 2009)
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Art History and Critique (Fall 2007) |
Aesthetic Theory (Fall 2006) |
Latin American Avant-Gardes (Winter 2006) |
Art, Humanism and Posthumanism (Fall 2005) |
Why Art History? (Fall 2004) |
1968 (Spring 2002) |
Marx's Capital (Spring 2002) |
Hegel's Phenomenology (Winter 2002) |
Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Fall 2001) |
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (Spring 2001) |
What is net.art ;-) ? (Winter 2001) |
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Selected recent and forthcoming publications
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"Photography Against Ontology," Photography
and Ontology: Unsettling Images, Edited by Donna West
Brett, Natalya Lusty
(New York: Routledge, 2018) |
“The Violence of the Real,” Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch
der Guernica-Gesellschaft 18 (2017). |
“Write your own too,” in Michael Corris, Leaving
Skull City: Selected Writings on Art (Dijon:
Les Presses du Réel, 2016) |
El
doble índice de la fotografía (una breve historia en tres
partes), co-authored with Robin Kelsey, Revista
Kaypunku (June 2016) |
Photography
and God, Oxford Art Journal (Spring 2015) |
“Toward
a Humanism of Work,” Reinventing Documentary: The
Art of Allan Sekula (Portland: Lewis and Clark,
2015), pp. 11-14. |
Citizen
Warhol (London: Reaktion Books, 2014) |
Communion
and Disunion in the Work of Allan Sekula,
Photographies (2014) |
The
Form of the Informal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary
African Art (Spring 2014) |
Communism's
Body, Photoworks (November 2013) |
Between
Inside and Out, in John C. Welchman, ed., Sculpture
and the Vitrine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) |
Institutionality
as Enlightenment, in Pascal Gielen, ed., Institutional
Attitudes (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013)
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Notes
from the Field: Detail, Art Bulletin (December 2012)
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Taste
Matters, Oxford Art Journal (June 2012) |
Photography's
Method in Jens Hoffmann, More
American Photographs (Wattis Institute for
Contemporary Arts, 2012) |
Review
of Reaktion Books's "Exposures" series (Etudes
photographiques, 2011) |
The
True and the Blurry in Achim Borchardt-Hume, Walid
Raad Miraculous Beginnings (Whitechapel Gallery 2010)
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Methodological
Hospitality (Transmissions Annual, inaugural issue,
2010)
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Photography
and Ontology (Philosophy and Photography, inaugural
issue, 2010)
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Krasinski
and Totality in Gabriela Switek, ed., Avant-garde
in the Bloc (JRP | Ringier, 2010). In Polish and
English. |
Institutional
Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, co-edited
with Alexander Alberro (MIT, 2009). Introduction: What
Was Institutional Critique? |
I
am nothing and I should be everything (Artforum,
February 2009) |
The
Beauty of Documentary, Function/Fiction, ed. France
Choinière, (Montreal: Dazibao, 2008)
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The
Meaning of Photography, co-edited with Robin Kelsey
(Clark/Yale, 2008). Forthcoming in Spanish.
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Photography
and Nationalism, Click!, an online publication of the
Smithsonian Institute, 2008. Published in book form under
the title Photography
Changes Everything (Aperture, 2012). |
The
Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (MIT
Press, 2006) An excerpt, "The Photography of Social Form,"
has been published in David Campany, ed., The
Cinematic (MIT Press, 2007) and the book as a whole
was published in Spanish in 2009 under the title El
eje del mundo; Fotografía y nación by Editorial
Gustavo Gili. See reviews by Nancy
Armstrong, Sarah
James, and John
Roberts. |
Collectivism
After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945,
co-edited with Gregory Sholette (Minnesota, 2006). See
reviews by Eda
Cufer, Philip
Glahn, Jan
Baetens, Jens
Kastner, Sarah
James, and Niels
Van Tomme. Chinese translation of the introduction,
"Periodizing Collectivism," in Art
Map (Beijing); Swedish translation in Glanta.
Translations of the whole book in Serbian
and forthcoming in Spanish. |
Visual
Worlds, co-edited with John R. Hall and Lisa Tamiris
Becker (Routledge, 2005). See review by Sam
Binkley. |
The Beauty of Documentary, Function/Fiction, ed. France
Choinière, (Montreal: Dazibao, 2008)
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For the Love of Abstraction, Third Text 94 (September
2008), Special issue: “Whither Tactical Media?" Reprinted in
Theory
in Contemporary Art since 1985, 2nd Edition, eds. Zoya
Kocur and Simon Leung (Wiley, 2012)
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Gesture
and Abstraction in Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness,
Migrations of Gesture (Minnesota, 2008) |
A
Modern Man (Artforum, October 2007) |
The
Artiste (Oxford Art Journal, Winter 2007) also
published in a slightly different form as The
Photography of Social Form: Jeff Wall and the City as
Subject Condition (Quaderns portàtils, no. 09, MACBA,
2007) |
The
Crowd in the Machine (New Left Review, Nov/Dec 2004) |
Periodizing
Collectivism, co-authored with Gregory Sholette (Third
Text, November 2004); translated into Swedish in Glänta
(1-2.06) |
The Shimmer of Industrial Form (in Chris
Townsend, ed., The
Art of Rachel Whiteread, Thames & Hudson, 2004) |
The
Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher
(Tate Papers, Spring 2004); also in Gail Finney, ed., Visual
Culture in 20th-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle
(Indiana University Press, 2006) |
I am
the Social: The Line of Edward Krasinski (Artforum,
November 2003) |
Bonjour,
Mademoiselle Collins (Hannah Collins: La Calle / The
Street, 2003) |
Die
Leidenschaft des Konzepts in Christoph Metzger, Conceptualisms
(Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2003) |
Conceptual
Work and Conceptual Waste (Discourse, Spring 2002) and
also in Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual
Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cambridge University
Press, 2004) |
Art History
after the New Art History (Art Journal, Spring 2002) |
Andy
Warhol's Red Beard (Art Bulletin, September 2001) |
010101
versus OiOiOi (Ramona, August 2001) |
Hysterics
of the World Unite! (Exhibition catalogue essay, What
is Left Over? Todd Ayoung and Carlos Andrade, North-udstillingssted,
Copenhagen, Denmark, 2000) |
Review
of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture
Industry (CAA Reviews, 2000) |
Review
of Martha Rosler, Positions in the Life World (CAA
Reviews, 2000) |
Conceptual
Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press,
1999) |
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