Political Futures: Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop’s paper will examine the rise of research-based art, offering a genealogy for its emergence in the 1990s. It argues that changes within this genre are partially tied to the reception of post-structuralist theory in art schools in the 1980s, and partly to technological developments in information management since the late 1990s. The viewer’s reception of research-based art has also shifted over these three decades, in tandem with an attention economy. The paper offers a critique of this artistic tendency: its post-hermeneutic approach, its reconfiguration of spectatorship, and its exacerbation of (rather than resistance to) information overload.

Claire Bishop (born 1971 in London) is an art historian, critic and author. She is visiting professor for Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London, and since 2008 associate professor in the PhD Program for Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. In addition to numerous articles in art journals, her publications include Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate/Routledge, 2005), Participation (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2006) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012). In her current book Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention (TDR, 2018), Bishop explores the impact of changing digital technologies on contemporary art and performance.