ProfJohn Roberts

My research has covered three main areas since the early 1990s: art’s critical autonomy, the possibility of realism in art (as a claim on ‘truth’ as opposed to realist ‘aesthetics’ or ‘resemblance’) and emancipatory technique. In this sense I see myself working within a critical theoretical tradition, that sees art as a mode of becoming that defies the normative order of capitalist reason, without assuming that the special dispensations of art and creativity miraculously escapes commodity relations; art’s emancipatory logic is immanent, rather than transcendent. As such in my writing over the last thirty years I have placed a strong emphasis on the connection between this logic and negation and non-compliance (The Philistine Controversy [with Dave Beech] Verso, 2002, ‘The Amateur’s Retort’, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, 2008, Photography and its Violations, Columbia University Press, 2014, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, Verso, 2015). Art can only remain art, if it constantly defies its own its given or inherited predications as art. This is why I hold to some notion of autonomy in art, and why I have given a great deal of attention to the writing of Adorno since the 1990s even though my theory of autonomy is largely post-Adornian. Art today is no longer attached to the aesthetic predicates of the art object; on the contrary, its sense of possibility is immanent to the heteronomous (the actual) itself. Art’s movement into the ‘expanded field’ is irrevocable. This is why recently I have done a lot of work on sorting out where exactly art sits as art – as opposed, that is, to being a branch of the culture industries – in this new space of engagement (The Intangibilities of Form, Verso 2007, ‘Art After Deskilling’, Historical Materialism, 2010, ‘Art, Neoliberalism and the Commons’, The Art of Direct Social Action, eds. Karen van den Berg , Cara M. Jordan, Phillip Kleinmichel, Sternberg Press, 2019, and ‘Art, Value, and Value-Form Theory’, The Value of Critique, eds, Isabelle Graw and Christoph Menke, Campus Verlag, 2019, all address this question). It is imperative not to lose sight of the fact, after conceptual art, that the experience art is irreducible to the object – as Adorno himself realized, obliquely, in Aesthetic Theory.

Underwriting this approach is something more than ‘art theory’ as an autonomous discipline. My writing is indebted to a wider range of disciplines (the critique of political economy, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, political theory and political philosophy and post-war continental philosophy), that sees art, as one moment – if a significant and determining moment – in the constant cultural and political battle between the shifting demands of emancipatory technique, and those forces, that would destroy it, or reduce it to mere decoration or academic standing. As such, I see my research, critically, in the post-Kantian tradition, as a commitment to notion of the production and reception of art, as form of Bildung. Art relationship to learning is not based on the knowledge it provides, as if writing and study were just hermeneutical exercises, but the space for a shared discussion of the problems of theory and practice. Recently, this has taken an expressly historical dimension, in my editing, with my colleague Alexei Penzin, of the first English translation of Boris Arvatov’s key Constructivist/Productivist avant-garde text from 1926, Art and Production (Pluto Press, 2017).

And, naturally, these concerns are carried into my research leadership. If my research cluster (‘Art, Philosophy and Social Practice’) provides a distinctive combination of art theoretical and philosophical work on a range of different forms of social engaged practice and performance, one of the strengths of the PhD programme within my research cluster, is the opportunity it gives to theorists and artists, or artists as theorists, to generate speculative forms of inquiry, and as such test ideas across disciplinary borders. This has become a distinctive aspect of ‘art study’ in the Faculty. This is underwritten by an extensive public lecture programme (CADRE) across art theory, philosophy and cultural theory, that I have organized, since the early 2000s, in order to support PG research and MA teaching. Speakers have included: Esther Leslie, Alberto Toscano, Marc James Léger, Dmitry Vilensky [Chto Delat], Platform, Claire Bishop, David Cunningham, Simon O’Sullivan, Stewart Martin, Geert van Kesteren, Eddie Chambers, Blake Stimson, Stefan Nowotny, Keti Chukhrov, Emanuel Almborg, Olga Goriunova, Luke Fowler, Jay Murphy, Marina Vishmidt, Benjamin Noys and Warren Neidich.

Since the writing on value and the avant-garde my concerns have also broadened into political philosophy, in the wake of the more expressly philosophical work I have continued to pursue over the last ten years, on agency, reason and epistemology (The Necessity of Errors, Verso 2011 [Die Notwendigeit von Irrtüm, Laika, 2015] and ‘Dialectic and Post-Hegelian Dialectic (Again)’, Journal of Critical Realism, 2013, ‘The Returns to Religion’, Part I and Part II, Historical Materialism, 2008). In 2018 I published the Reasoning of Unreason: Universalism, Capitalism and Disenlightenment (Bloomsbury) a rethinking of universalism and unreason, and I’m currently working on a companion text to this on ‘self-love’ (amour-propre) and libidinal economy. In addition, my artistic and cultural concerns have expanded into dramaturgy and theatre and notions of the virtual-fictive, as part of my general work in the research cluster on socially engaged art and performativity and my continuing theoretical work on participatory art practice (‘Art, Neoliberalism and the Fate of the Commons’). In 2016 I published a theoretical and historical reconstruction of the work of five imaginary artists supposedly working in the 1980s (Thoughts an Index Not Freely Given, Zero Books, 2016), and between 2016-2018 completed a cycle of seven plays addressing questions of desire and unreason, in different anti-naturalistic registers and historical and contemporary contexts. The first play, ‘Hölderlin and Marx in Tübingen’ has been translated into Russian, and published in the leading drama journal, Translit, Moscow, in 2018; other translations in Russian and other languages are being planned.

In 2020, working through some long-standing issues in my work around emancipatory technique and the ‘remaking’ of the popular, I published Red Days: Popular Music and the English Counterculture, 1965-1975 (Autonomedia/Minor Compositions), that refocuses some of the questions I have dealt with recently in my work on the avant-garde, but in relation to music.

Since 2000 I have been an invited speaker at numerous Universities, museums and public galleries in Europe and North America, including, University of Copenhagen (2001), Aarhus University (2002), Jan van Eyck Acadamie, Maastricht (2004), Documenta 12, Kassel (2007), Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Barcelona, (2008), University of Warsaw (2011), Bergen National Academy of the Arts (2011), International University of Andalucia, Seville (2011), Princeton University (2011), University of Vienna (2011), Moscow Polytechnic Institute (2013), Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie (2013), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte: Rainer Sofia, Madrid (2013), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013), Institute for Cultural Inquiry, (ICI), Berlin, (2013). Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris (2013), National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2014), Goethe-Universasität, Frankfurt am Main (2014), Hochschule, Karlsruhe, (2014), Galerie Thomas Flor, Berlin (2014), Kunstpavilion, Innsbruck (2014), Manifesta 10, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, (2014), HAU (Hebel am Ufer), Berlin (2015), Concordia University, Montreal (2015), Yale University (2015), Dublin Institute of Technology (2015), Künstlerhaus Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK), Vienna (2016), University of Paris-8 (2016), Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen (2016), Brussels Centre for Fine Arts (2016), Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main (2017), Schaulager, Basel (2017), Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing (2018), and the Max-Planck Institute, Berlin (2019)