Dr. TJ Demos

Reader Modern and contemporary art tj.demos@ucl.ac.uk

T.J. Demos writes widely on modern and contemporary art and his essays have appeared in journals including Grey Room and October. He is also a critic, writing for magazines such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Art Press, and recently completed a term on the editorial board of the quarterly Art Journal. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant conventions, whether representational, aesthetic, or social and political. He is the author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007), which places Duchamp’s installations and mixed-media projects - including his “portable museum,” La Boîte-en-valise - in relation to geopolitical and aesthetic displacement during the early twentieth century’s periods of world war and nationalism.

T.J. Demos’ current work focuses on contemporary art, investigating in particular the diverse ways that artists have negotiated the recently emerging conjunction of political sovereignty and statelessness. His present book project, provisionally titled Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization, explores the relation of contemporary art--including practices from North America, Europe, and the Middle East--to the experience of social dislocation and political crisis, where art figures in ways both critically analytical and creatively emancipating. Attendant to developments in poststructural and postcolonial theory, his present research also considers new ways of comprehending photographic and video-based practice, art and ecology, socially-engaged art, and the recent restructurings of art institutions. He is interested in supervising research in these and other areas.

Current PhD students:

Paula Brailovsky, Collective Approaches to 'Border Art': 1984-2005.
Maja Fowkes, Art and Environment in Central Europe During the 1960s and 1970s.
Denise Frimer, The Art of Education: On the Engineering of Social Relations in Biennials and Museums, 1997-2007.
Paolo Magagnoli, Historical Representation in Photography and Video: 1970s-2000s.
Lauren Rotenberg, Contemporary Art's Economy of Immaterial Production.

Selected publications of T.J. Demos: • The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007) [link] • “Giardini: A Fairytale,” in Steve McQueen, British Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2009. [pdf] • “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology,” Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2009. [pdf] • “Emily Jacir: Poetry’s Beyond,” Hugo Boss Prize 2008 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2008). [pdf] • “Life Full of Holes,” Grey Room, no. 24 (Fall 2006), pp. 72-88. [pdf] Further publications