Browsing by Author "Hudson-Miles, Richard"
Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Decolonising Fashion(De Montfort University: Stephen Lawrence Centre, 2022-05-10) Hudson-Miles, RichardThis presentation gives an overview of the current movement to decolonise the fashion industry, on the back of the Rhodes Must Fall movement and Black Lives Matter. Key designers discussed include Grace Wales-Bonner, Le Tings, alongside Small Axe by Steve McQueen and the portraits of 1970s Lewisham youth by John Goto.Item Embargo Disease / Control(ReMarx Books, 2020-07-01) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, Andrew; de Rosen, FélixThis 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.Item Open Access Experiments in Autonomous Art Education in the UK, 2010-Present(Educação & Realidade, 2021-02-16) Hudson-Miles, RichardThis paper critically surveys and contextualises the recent wave of autonomous art schools established in the UK since the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding & Student Finance, or Browne Review. It argues that these institutions have been formed as a direct response to this economic policy and the broader neoliberal economisation of higher education. By drawing upon the work of the Edu-Factory Collective, and the Autonomist Marxist theory that inspired their project, this paper argues that these new alternative art schools can be understood as ‘common autonomous institutions’. Furthermore, that they represent genuinely viable alternatives to the commodified, financialised, and marketised state provision. Finally, drawing upon the work of Santos, three alternative art schools (The Other MA, Southend, UK; The School of the Damned, London, UK; @.ac, UK) are analysed as nascent forms of the polyphonic pluriversity.Item Open Access Hudson-Miles, R., and Broadey, A. J. (2019) Towards a Schizoanalysis of the Contemporary University. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8 (12): pp. 60-65.(Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 2019-12-23) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, AndyThis article was produced in response to Justin Cruikshank's (2019) article 'The Feudal University in the Age of Gaming the System. The article sketches a non-linear history of the university, informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of schizoanalysis. The history of the university has been read as a cycle of foundational paradigm shifts, wherein emergent socio-cultural forces destroy dominant-hegemonic university problematics and rebuild the institution in their own image. Most famously, Bill Readings (1999, 54) identifies a sequence beginning with a Kantian 18th century ‘university of reason’, followed by a Humboldtian 19th century ‘university of culture’, which gradually cedes to the techno-bureaucratic ‘university of excellence’ produced by the socioeconomic forces of 20th century globalisation and the decline of the nation state. Our article dramatises the decline of the once rational university as a delirious, oedipal journey down the River Styx into infernal oblivion.Item Open Access Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Pedagogy?(Taylor and Francis, 2020-05-18) Hudson-Miles, RichardThis is a review essay responding to The Gold and the Dross: Althusser for Educators, by David Backer, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2019. As well as critiquing some of the themes of Backer's book, it also situates its subject, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser within his pedagogical and political conjuncture of 1970s France. The review is essay is partly a critical history, and partly a defence of aspects of Althusserian theory, in the face of ad hominem attacks against Althusser the man. Between Althusser, and the disavowal of Althusser by his former student Jacques Rancière, the author retrieves the genuinely revolutionary aspects of Althusserian Marxist pedagogy from its permanently tainted legacy.Item Embargo Let us Build a City and a Tower”: Figures of the University in Gregor Reisch’s (1503) Margarita Philosophica’(Rowman and Littlefield, 2022-04-01) Hudson-Miles, RichardThis book chapter outlines a critical reading of public domain images from from Gregor Reisch’s Renaissance encyclopedia, the Margarita Philosophica (1503). This reading is forwarded as an allegory of the neoliberal economisation (Brown 2015) of the contemporary university. Indeed, the author argues that Reisch's images uncannily prefigure the contemporary higher education conjuncture. As well as drawing on a range of sources from critical university studies (De Sousa Santos 2018; Hall 2018; Brown 2015; McGettigan 2013; Edu-Facory Collective 2011; Reading 1996), this chapter doubles as an critical introduction to university pedagogy from the middle ages.Item Open Access Messy Democracy: The Art School as War Machine(InSEA Publications, 2020-01-23) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, Andy; Burge, Hollie; Fooks, Laura Jane; Cousins, RebeccaThis paper offers a critical case study of an educational collaboration between the artists’ collective @.ac (www.attackdotorg.com), and the staff and students of the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK, 9th April - 2nd May 2018 (fig. 1). This pedagogical experiment saw the university gallery, Hanover Project, transformed into an autonomous art school whose curriculum and agenda was controlled entirely by the university’s students for the duration of the exhibition. This practice-based research project attempted to make visible the concealed power relationships operating implicitly within the teaching of art and design, and also participatory art projects. This artificial ‘democratisation’ of the art school within the institutional frame of the neoliberal university highlighted the extent to which the marketisation, commodification, and financialization (McGettigan, 2013) of HE art education have de-democratised the art school.Item Open Access New V&A menswear exhibition: fashion has always been at the heart of gender politics(The Conversation, 2022-03-24) Hudson-Miles, RichardThis short article, written for the online magazine The Conversation discusses some of the questions raised by the V&A's Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear exhibition (19-Mar-2022 – 06-Nov-2022). The article discusses Victorian masculine self-denial, the 1960s Peacock revolution, John Carl Flügel's Freudian reading of menswear, and Harry Styles in a dress on the cover of British Vogue.Item Open Access The Pedagogy of Pulling Down Statues(Architecture, Media, Politics, and Society, 2020-12-04) Hudson-Miles, RichardOn 7th June 2020 protestors violently pulled down the statue of Edward Colston, erected in 1895 in the centre of Bristol, UK. A plinth that raised the sculpture above head height was mounted by protesters, who blindfolded the statue, lassoed ropes around its head and hauled it to the ground. The statue severed from its base upon impact and lay prostrated on the ground before the onrushing protesters. One protester placed his knee on its neck, mimicking the actions of Derek Chauvin as he killed George Floyd. Colston’s wealth, accumulated through the slave trade, has been central to urban development of Bristol. This spectacle of protest ruptured the status quo and forced normalised aspects of Britain’s colonial history back into question. Within days sister acts against monuments to slave owners, imperialists, and racists have subsequently appeared in cities across the world. These acts of iconoclasm are helping to recalibrate contemporary discourses around race. As this paper argues, these actions also serve a heuristic function which could be summarised as follows. 1) Threatening public sculptures forces a critical dialogue concerning national values and the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968) 2) Threatening public statues starts a critical dialogue about imperialism, colonialism, and the naturalised histories of cities built on primitive accumulation 3) Threatening public statues raises awareness of public monuments which would otherwise be forgotten elements of the ‘representational space’ (Lefebvre 1974) of the consumer city 4) Because of the above, direct action against public monuments is not only an act of iconoclastic opposition to the ‘consensus system’ (Rancière 1999: 95) of neoliberal democracy, but the advent of a radically expanded, anarcho-democratic conception of the public university.Item Embargo The Pedagogy of the Pedagogical Turn(Emerald, 2021-08-01) Hudson-Miles, RichardBy introducing readers to the educational turn in contemporary art, this chapter shows how contemporary artworks and exhibitions can offer educational experiences in themselves. Furthermore, that such artworks constitute a radically expanded or situated form of art teaching. I argue that educational turn art issues an important challenge to conventional methods of education which are still rooted in the classroom. The first section of this chapter surveys the art of the educational turn, demonstrating its pedagogic effects and innovations. The second section of this chapter draws on some of the lessons of these artworks, alongside some of the ideas from critical pedagogy (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1996 [1970]; Rancière, 2010, 2009, 2004, 1999, 1991) which complement them. In conclusion, I attempt to synthesise both into the outlines of a pedagogy of the pedagogical turn, based on principles of humanism, institutional critique, and democracy.Item Open Access Scenes from the History of the Art School(Taylor and Francis, 2022-11-03) Broadey, Andy; Hudson-Miles, RichardThe following essay proceeds through twenty-one visual and textual ‘scenes’ from the complex history of the art school, as a contribution to debates about its political character. The title is taken from Jacques Rancière’s (2013) Aisthesis. This is Rancière’s most sustained exposition of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’. His strategy in this book is to juxtapose ‘the event’ of an artwork against ‘the interpretive network which gives it meaning’ (2013, ix). He is specifically interested in the transition between different ‘regimes of art’. The scenes in this article map the transition from what Rancière calls the ‘representative regime’ to the ‘aesthetic regime’ on to the historical, pedagogical, ideological, and political evolution of the modern art school. These scenes roughly cover the period from the formation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the art school protests in 1968. They also include references to the nineteenth-century UK Schools of Design, Socialist Realism, Greenbergian Modernism, Althusserian ideology critique, and the Bauhaus. This essay is a sketch leading toward a longer, non-linear, counter-history of the art school.Item Open Access Towards a Base Materialism of the Art School(Loughborough University, 2020-10-29) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, AndrewThis 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.Item Open Access What Artists Want, What Artists Need: A Critical History of Feral Art School, Hull, UK(Wiley, 2021-08-27) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Goodman, Jackie; Jones, JayneThe article contextualises the emergence of the Feral Art School, established in Hull in 2018 by artist-educators following the winding down of Hull School of Art and Design. This alternative art school is the most recent of many established in the UK since the government’s Independent Review of Higher Education Funding & Student Finance or Browne Review. This article argues that the processes of ‘economisation’ enacted by this review have severely threatened the health of arts education in the UK, forcing the closure of provision and increasing barriers to higher education arts education for the disadvantaged. This article uses the example of Feral Art School to demonstrate how provincial art schools might re-emerge in new, counter-hegemonic forms. The Feral Art School is run as a Community Interest Company (CIC) with cooperative values. We argue that these values extend to the philosophy of education underpinning all of Feral’s activities.Item Embargo ‘What is a Work of Art?’(Rebus, 2022-06-06) Hudson-Miles, Richard; Broadey, AndrewThis 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.