Lancaster University

Graduate Student, Institute for the Contemporary Arts

Supervisors: Dr Martin Iddon
Dr Charlie Gere

About

I'm a late academic starter but I benefit from having been born in a generation where no-one bats an eyelid if you re-invent yourself in your 40s.  I began a pt MA in Contemporary Arts Research at Lancaster in October 2008.

I'm interested in the economic, social and ideological bases of the aesthetic choices of the educated middle classes, whose interests get a bit sidelined in the big race in the academy to make up for its embarrassment that it ignored popular culture for so long.  Fair enough, but it's over-correcting itself now.

The project I'm working on takes contemporary classical art music as a case study in the dialogue between sociological and determinist theories of art, (which are weaker at getting to grips with the aesthetic specificity of the artwork) and aesthetics or idealist approaches (which are less good at interrogating the role of social, political and ideological factors). Literature has historically dominated this conversation: it's time for new music to have its place there too.

The people whose work I find most helpful in this respect (obviously Marx should go without saying) include Althusser, Bourdieu, Lefebvre, Georgina Born, Tia DeNora, John Frow, Janet Wolff, Raymond Williams, Jean Burgess, Giles Hooper and people who have written on subcultural theory.

Another more polemical interest I have is that Cultural Studies needs to reinsert class into its analysis rather than continue its long bedazzlement with marginality, race and identity politics, which can skirt round concrete issues of poverty, deprivation and inequality. The emascualted contemporary version of anti-racist and anti-sexist discourse can easily function uncritically within neo-liberalism. A paper I'm preparing about this will be presented at the conference of the British Sociological Association in April 2010.

It's one of the many learning curves that I'm on that a convincing sounding abstract, combined with an absolute lack of actual knowledge of the field that I'll be talking about, has landed me a spot at a conference. But then, I'm not here to do things of which I'm already capable.

I am HTML/Layout Editor for thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal.

Outside of University I put together various shows which are influenced by the Fluxus artists. My latest show, John Cage's Disco Classics, combines two interests of mine which were never intended to be bedfellows: Fluxus-type performance art, and disco and jazz-funk. An Oxford newspaper reviewed it as "inspired and highly original...performed with deadpan panache" and its presentation at the first Preston Tringe [sic] was reviewed as "the most out-there performance of the festival."

I recently co-devised and performed in a piece with the Glasgow and Israeli artists Shelly Nadashi, Laurie Pitt and Zohar Shafir, which attracted support from the Scottish Arts Council and the British Council, and which sold out (and then some) the Studio Warehouse Glasgow. http://tinyurl.com/yh5yj43

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