Art and (bare) life: A biopolitical inquiry
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Berry1
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Sternberg Press
- ISBN
- 9783956793936
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- To produce a genealogical account, an extensive historical study was undertaken into five movements through which life enters art in new ways: French revolutionary painting; nineteenth-century Impressionism; post-war Abstract Expressionism and Negritude poetry; Body and performance art (1960s-2000s); and twenty-first-century British public art. Alongside this intensive research of artists and artworks, a parallel comparative study of biopolitical theory and its debates was also undertaken – from Arendt, Foucault, and Agamben to decolonial, black and intersectional feminist theory. This writing process, lasting 5 years, allowed a dual reading of the conceptions of life to art and power across two centuries.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Art and (Bare) Life is a 327-page monograph published by Sternberg Press, a Berlin-based independent publisher of art and cultural criticism. Sternberg’s roster of authors includes leaders of the field such as Isabelle Graw, Diedrich Diedrichsen and Anthony Downey.
Art and (Bare) Life involved extensive historical research and a multi-disciplinary approach, combining art history, biopolitical theory and aesthetic philosophy to develop a biopolitical rereading of modern art history for the first time. The book enquires into the origins of the modern democratic state to understand how its population management and productive shaping of citizenry mirrors a progressive tendency in art to open up direct and transformative relationships to life. The book took five years to write and involved mastering specialisms from state theory, decolonial and critical race theory, to the history of evolutionary science, sexual liberation politics and neoliberal urban development. Each of the book’s five chapters focuses on a different problematic and historical period from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, to develop a historically rich picture of biopower and art’s interrelated development within modernity and post-sovereignty.
The book builds on a book co-authored with Anthony Iles, No Room to Move: Radical Art in the Regenerate City (Mute, 2009), which asked how neoliberal urban regeneration schemes attempted to dilute social conflict by commissioning inclusive, participatory and site-specific artworks. Art and (Bare) Life was reviewed in Art Monthly and Art Review, Berry was invited to give the keynote at Edinburgh University’s ‘Private Life’ conference (2019) and the book has been read as part of the ‘Constructing the Real’ public reading group in New York City (2020). It has prompted Berry’s new research into representation as an interconnected political and artistic problem.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
