Browsing by Author "Broadey, Andrew"

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    Disease / Control
    (ReMarx Books, 2020-07-01) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, Andrew; de Rosen, Félix
    This visual essay will appropriate the style of Marxist art historian John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing (1972), which inverts the traditionally hierarchical relationship between text and image to construct an image driven argument which is radically reader centered and open. Whilst Berger’s essay critiques the interrelations of art, capitalism, and hegemonic Western ideology, ours seeks to bring the current COVID-19 ‘lockdown’ into alignment with similar historical ‘lockdowns’ in a dialectical image of disciplinary society and disciplinary techniques. As Foucault (1977) has recognised, the transition between the exclusion of the leper colony and the tightly monitored plague village marked a transition in disciplinary logic; from the dream of a society purified by purging all deviance, to that of a perfectly ordered society where each individual in monitored, isolated, self-regulating, and in their proper place. Following Foucault, Deleuze (1992) argued that these disciplinary societies, driven by institutional power, had mutated into anarchic and decentered ‘societies of control’. Here, the diffusion of power throughout society has created a ‘generalised crisis’ beyond the control of singlular institutions or governments. Yuk Hui (2015) has recently demonstrated the hyper-acceleration of this process following the introduction of new media technologies and new forms of disciplinary ‘modulation’. Our visual essay seeks to map these mutations visually and textually, using quotes from the authors above in juxtaposition with original analysis and found images from the digital commons. The essay constitutes an eleven page sequence. It aims to demonstrate the futility of the Conservative government’s attempt to perform power through the spectacle of lockdown, as Foucault’s dream of a perfectly ordered society (1977: 198) slips through their fingers in a generalised crisis of mismanagement.
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    Towards a Base Materialism of the Art School
    (Loughborough University, 2020-10-29) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, Andrew
    This visual essay used found images alongside original AV footage to outline a base materialism of the neoliberal art school, alongside its anarchical general economy which exceeds the restricted economy of current ‘economised’ (Brown 2015) curricula and managerialism. This reading is conducted via Georges Bataille's ideas of base materialism. Bataille’s 1929 essay ‘The Big Toe’ explains that the abject responses solicited by this digit emerge from a broader psycho-social logocentrism which equates dirt, darkness, and baseness as principles of evil, to be repressed accordingly, as Hell is to the Heavens or Eden. Inversely, cleanliness, light, and celestial space embody the just, and approximate the elevated gait that distinguishes human beings from primates and other beasts. Paradoxically, its aberrancies, which are minimised or aestheticised in classical figurative painting, are also what demarcates our humanity. Our disgust with images such as Boiffard’s (above) is partly produced from ‘the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse’. Bataille’s concept of base materialism undercuts all ideals and idealisms with its ontology of dirt and debris, but also radically exceeds the restricted economy of Marxist political economy. In an era where university vice-chancellors attempt to seduce the next generations of art school students with signature buildings and the latest studio gadgetry, our video essay forwards an alternative base materialism of the art school, which counterposes splinters, paint stains, chemical burns, cigarette ash, violent protest, and cirrhosis of the liver, to the strictly regulated and disciplinary space of the contemporary neoliberal art school, whose restricted economy is realised spatially in the glass and steel aesthetic of the vanity projects of university vice chancellors.
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    ‘What is a Work of Art?’
    (Rebus, 2022-06-06) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, Andrew
    This is chapter from Vino, V., ed. (2022) Introduction to Philosophy: Aesthetic Theory and Practice. The chapter introduces readers to six ways that the philosophical aesthetics has tried to figure the specificity of works of art. This starts with the representational theories of art developed from Plato and Aristotle. Then, the formalist theories of Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg. This leads to a discussion of theories of expression from Tolstoy to R. G. Collingwood to Deleuze and Guattari. The next section discusses the aesthetic attitude analysed by Dickie and Kant others. Then, the institutional theory of art from Danto to Benjamin and 1970s institutional critique. Finally, poststructuralist and anti-essentialist theories which challenge all of the preceding work.