GAI SAVOIR

Between 1979 and 1986 I published some four articles on the Paris Commune, popular print and the social organisation of the arts in France in Art History-, _Block, and Oxford Art Journal. All of this came from an undergraduate History module at Portsmouth Poly that I taught with Roger Thomas. Out of these came a short series of pieces comparing art education and social formation in England and France between the late eighteenth century and the 1850s, published in Les révoltes logiques, Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of Design History and the proceedings of the Louvre bicentennial conference on the French Revolution, David contre David, 1989. All of these were methodologically marked by my collaboration with Jacques Rancière and Les révoltes logiques. They were extended theoretically through an essay ‘History, time and the morphology of critical language, or Publicola’s choice’ in ”Art criticism and its institutions in nineteenth century France”, ed. M Orwicz, Manchester, MUP 1994. In 1983 I published my ‘Ingres and the Academic Dictionary’ in Art History, and article that received a great deal of attention and that allowed me to re-build my old thesis work into the book on Ingres.

In 1983 I began the work on Street Noises, which first resulted in the article ‘Musical Moments’ in Yale French Studies (1987) and in four broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 in 1987 – 1988, three on Parisian popular song and its topographies, and one on Gustave Flaubert – a short radio play. During this period I also wrote ‘Carmenology’, a piece that regrouped the themes of these different research projects.

Throughout my work I have cultivated a thread of art criticism, mainly concerning the work of artists or curators who are personally close to me, but including John Baldessari, Roxy Walsh, Pierre Imhof and Ingrid Kerma, Louise Bourgeois (in MOMA Oxford papers, Vol 1, 1996) and Gérard Fromanger (Photogenic painting, my analysis of Deleuze’s and Foucault’s essays on Fromanger, Black Dog, 1999). I have written three short catalogue essays for Rafael von Uslar’s work in curating international queer/post-colonial exhibitions in Sydney, Munich, Amsterdam and Cologne, and I am planning a new essay on Mark Fairnington and another on gay art for a forthcoming major exhibition in Cologne curated by Frank Wagner. Rafael and I are beginning to plan an exhibtion based on the archives of the Leather Museum in Offenbach. An aesthetics of deferred action is unfolded in my ‘…respicit Orpheus’ written for the Drawing Centre’s Drawing Papers, no 24, ed de Zegher and Massumi, NY, 2001 – Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Eurydice Series. Essays on Pierre Imhof, Roxy Walsh and Jochen Flinzer either appear or will appear soon on this site.

My essays on gay poetics, such as ‘Do not touch: Tom with Sebastiano, Kant and others’ (Versus 5, 1995), first published in Texte zur Kunst (1994), ‘Slavery/sublimity’ in The Eight Technologies of Otherness= (ed. Sue Golding, Routledge, 1997), and ‘A Roman Holiday’ (Parallax 25, 2002) are closely related to this mode of the short analytic essay as well as being sketches for my future project online.

My last piece for Block, (1991) ‘A Down on the Upbeat: Adorno, Benjamin and the Jazz question’, extended the work of Street Noises into critical theory and resulted in my essay ‘Total Ellipsis’ written for Parallax 2, 1995, an interrogation of the absence of Zola as a reference in Benjamin’s Passagen Werk, worked through the redevelopment of Les Halles in our own time. This question of a critical topography, bringing together the urban subject with critical theory and a gendered epistemology, characterises my work on gay Paris such as ‘Travel for men: from Claude Lévi-Strauss to the Sailor Hans’, in Traveller’s Tales, ed. G Robertson et al, Routledge, 1994: ‘The poetics of space re-written: from Renaud Camus to the gay city guide’, in Parisian Fields, ed, M Sheringham, Reaktion, 1996: ‘Gay Paris: trace and ruin’, in Hieroglyphics of Space, ed N Leech, Routledge, 2002.

New lines of thinking are worked through in my ‘Waiting and Seeing’, in the Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 2, Number 3, December 2003.

An account of my intellectual formation can be found in my essay on Jean-Louis Schefer, ‘From Structure to Enigma: Schefer and signification side by side’, in a forthcoming festschrift for Schefer, ed. S Bann, POL, Paris. His Scénographie d’un tableau (1967) remains a work of extreme enigma, and Jeffrey Steele and I used to try to teach it to undergaduate artists in the early 1970s, after which our incipient Maoism pushed this kind of theory rather to the side!!! See also my interview ‘Inventing Recollection’ in Interrogating Cultural Studies, Theory Politics and Practice, ed. Paul Bowman (London, Pluto, 2003), the aftermath of my actually working on the construction of a cultural studies programme with Barbara Engh and Griselda Pollock in Leeds. Yet no account of these kinds can itself account for the effect of the endless conversations that carry on and echo after time, even when one fails to see a friend for years on year.

But fundamentally my lasting beliefs in an overarching marxian sociology on the one hand, and its complementary other in the aleatoric practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s visual and musical avant-gardes have endured, while weaving themselves through the warp and weft of Lacanian and Kristevan and Derridian theoretical fields. With Gavin Bryars and a group of students at Portsmouth Poly(sic) I helped to set up the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and if you check up, I think, hope, that the Richard Strauss extract may be one that has me on the French Horn.

Books:

Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900 – 1940. Manchester, MUP, 1993

Ingres then, and now, London, Routledge, 2000

Edited Collections:

Voices of the People: the social life of ‘La sociale’ in Second Empire Paris, with Roger Thomas, London, Routledge, 1987

About Michael Baxandall, Oxford, Blackwell, Association of Art Historians, 1998.

Fingering Ingres, with Susan Siegfried, Oxford, Blackwell, Association of Art Historians, 2001

Other Objects of Desire, collectors and collecting queerly, with Michael Camille, Oxford, Blackwell, Association of Art Historians, 2001

Radio: [listings to follow]