- Visual Arts Department, 0084
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA. 92093
Grant Kester
University of California, San Diego, Visual Arts, Faculty Member
- Visual Arts, Art History, Contemporary Art, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Aesthetics, Aesthetics and Politics, and 27 moreArt Theory, Civil Society and the Public Sphere, Art Criticism, Dialogism, Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Environmental Art, Activist Art, Collaborative Art Practice, Political Theory, Phenomenology, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Social Conflict, Bakhtin, 20th century Avant-Garde, Social movements and revolution, Populism, Relational aesthetics, Critical Theory, Frankfurt School, Bakhtin dialogism, Participatory and Relational Arts, Tzvetan Todorov, Axel Honneth, Kesterites, Activist Ethnography, Social Movements, and Gilbert Simondonedit
- I am a Professor of Art History and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (field-... moreI am a Professor of Art History and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (field-journal.com). My publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004, second edition 2013),The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011), Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, co-edited with Bill Kelley (Duke University Press, 2017), The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2023) and Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Duke University Press, 2024). My essays have been published in Art in Theory: The West in the World-An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Wiley/Blackwell, 2020), A Companion to Public Art (Oxford, 2016), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2006), Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2004), Poverty and Social Welfare in America: An Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2004), Politics and Poetics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martins Press, 1999), and the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998).edit
This is the introduction to Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2024), which will be out in December.
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My book, Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art, will be coming out from Duke in December. They're offering a 30% discount for pre-orders.
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We are pleased to introduce FIELD Issue #24 for Spring 2023. This issue has been guest edited by FIELD editorial collective members Primrose Paul and Laura Thompson and Primrose Paul. The issue presents a range of essays and interviews... more
We are pleased to introduce FIELD Issue #24 for Spring 2023. This issue has been guest edited by FIELD editorial collective members Primrose Paul and Laura Thompson and Primrose Paul. The issue presents a range of essays and interviews addressing the broader cultural impact of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) which emerged in the wake of the police killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
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This is the introduction to The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2023).
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Duke University Press is offering 30% off pre-orders of my new book, The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (coming out in July).
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FIELD Issue 23 is dedicated to the pioneering environmental art practice of Helen and Newton Harrison. The Harrisons were long-time faculty members in the Visual Arts department at UCSD, where FIELD is produced. The issue has been guest... more
FIELD Issue 23 is dedicated to the pioneering environmental art practice of Helen and Newton Harrison. The Harrisons were long-time faculty members in the Visual Arts department at UCSD, where FIELD is produced. The issue has been guest edited by Tatiana Sizonenko, who is also the project curator of an important retrospective exhibition, Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, to be held at the La Jolla Historical Society (September 20, 2024-January 19, 2025). California Work has been funded by the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time initiative. This issue of FIELD was first envisioned as a compendium of papers presented as part of a public event held in La Jolla last March, intended to lay the groundwork for the exhibition. The event, "Listening to the Web of Life," was attended by Newton Harrison, who was in fragile health at the time, and featured many of the key figures in contemporary environmental or ecological art practice. As the copy for this issue was undergoing an initial round of editing we learned the sad news that Newton had passed. As a result, the issue took on a new function; to both document the original proceedings and to honor the broader importance of the Harrison's legacy (Helen passed in 2019). For this reason, we've commissioned some additional remembrances from artists and curators who worked with the Harrison's in the past. It's difficult to overestimate the foundational influence of the Harrison's work within the broader field of activist, environmental art. Certainly there is a broader history of important ecological art practice dating back to the 1960s, but the Harrisons are unique among the generation of artists who emerged at this time for their single-minded focus on issues of environmental sustainability and complex ecosystems, extending eventually to a global scale. They have, at this point, influenced several generations of subsequent artists, as the contributors to this special issue will attest. My own memories of the Harrisons began in the mid-1990s, when I encountered them at the important Littoral events, organized by Ian Hunter and Celia Larner in Manchester, England and Dún Laoghaire, Ireland. Hunter and Larner have played a key role in the evolution of rural-based art practices in the UK, and had a special affinity for the Harrison's work. Helen and Newton were charismatic, generous, and always attuned to the complex gestalt of the ecosystems around them. I was fortunate enough to engage with them again at UCSD when I arrived here in 2000. It was their openness and generosity, combined with an unyielding commitment to the preservation of the natural world, that provided the necessary
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FIELD Issue 22 has just been launched.
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FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism is pleased to announce the launch of issue #21 (Spring 2022), with a special focus on socially engaged art practice in Iran. This issue has been guest edited by Saba Zavarei, who’s... more
FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism is pleased to announce the launch of issue #21 (Spring 2022), with a special focus on socially engaged art practice in Iran. This issue has been guest edited by Saba Zavarei, who’s research was featured in FIELD #17 (Winter 2021).[1] For this issue Saba has assembled a remarkable collection of contributors writing on a range of creative, curatorial and critical practices in contemporary Iran. Saba herself has contributed an important analysis of the choreographic politics of public dance and performance. Helia Darabi examines the emergence of new forms of critical, site-specific art within the increasingly complex institutional structures of the Tehran artworld during the 1990s and 2000s. Azadeh Ganjeh describes her work in public performance in Tehran, drawing on the traditions of Boalian theater to involve spectators in ongoing dialogues about pressing cultural issues. Pouria Jahanashad discusses the complex meaning of “political art” in contemporary criticism, grounding her analysis in a reading of “informal” art practices in Iran operating in urban space. Shahram Khosravi explores the persecution of the nomadic Bakhtiari people, through an analysis of efforts to appropriate their cultural history in contemporary Iran. Elham Puriya Mehr examines the political potential of activist curatorial practice, using the example of Club 29 in Tehran to analyze the tension between intervention and institutional appropriation. Khosravi Noori provides an illuminating meditation on the relationship between liberation in Palestine and the often-opportunistic appropriation of the First Intifada by the Iranian government. Finally, Narciss Sohrabi expands on this analysis with her discussion of the transformative power of street art and graffiti in Iran during and after the 2009 uprising. We are extremely grateful to Saba for her tireless work in developing this special issue, and to her contributors for their invaluable insights, and the risks that they have taken, and continue to take, in registering their dissent. FIELD is available at: field-journal.com.
[1] See Bria Dinkins, “Interview with Saba Zavarei,” FIELD #17 (Winter 2021). http://field-journal.com/editorial/interview-with-saba-zavarie
[1] See Bria Dinkins, “Interview with Saba Zavarei,” FIELD #17 (Winter 2021). http://field-journal.com/editorial/interview-with-saba-zavarie
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FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism is pleased to announce the launch of issue #20 (Winter 2022).
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Spring-Fall 2021), a special double issue which examines the long-term research project, Learning from documenta (lfd). This project was developed by Elpida Rikou and Eleana Yalouri in response to the staging of the documenta exhibition... more
Spring-Fall 2021), a special double issue which examines the long-term research project, Learning from documenta (lfd). This project was developed by Elpida Rikou and Eleana Yalouri in response to the staging of the documenta exhibition in Athens, Greece in 2017. The issue was guest edited by Elpida Rikou, Eleana Yalouri and Apostolos Lampropoulos, esteemed scholars working in and across the areas of anthropology, comparative literature, anthropological sociology and artist practice. This issue represents the culminating documentation of a long-term investigation into documenta 14 (2017) that we began in issue 11 (Fall 2018). While the biennial format has a long history (the first Whitney Biennial opened in 1933 and documenta was launched in 1955 as part of the Federal Horticulture Show in Kassel) it has mushroomed in importance over the past two decades, coincident with the dramatic expansion of the market for contemporary art. In this respect it epitomizes the significant new forms of ideological labor that occur as contemporary art struggles to retain its transgressive aura, even as its subject to unprecedented levels of commodification. The travelling or nomadic biennial has introduced a further inflection of this institutional schema. By moving the biennial out of the privileged cultural centers of Europe and North America, it provides the artworld with controlled access to a new reservoir of symbolic and cultural materials (typically urban spaces defined by a relative lack of economic privilege). This spatial displacement provides the frisson of the social real necessary to maintain the perception that an institutional apparatus that depends on the taste patterns of the 1% can nonetheless maintain an exemplary, critical relationship to global forms of oppression or inequality. While the biennial as such has been the subject of a number of recent scholarly publications, the research assembled by the Learning from documenta research project (LfD) represents the first large scale, systematic analysis of a single biennial undertaken by an interdisciplinary team drawn from the arts, humanities and social sciences. While the biennial as such has been the subject of a number of recent scholarly publications, the research assembled by the LfD project represents the first large scale, systematic analysis of a single biennial undertaken by an interdisciplinary team drawn from the arts, humanities and social sciences. FIELD is honored to provide a platform for this important, and extensive, study (it features almost forty essays over the two
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This is the editorial for Issue #17 of the journal FIELD
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Talking to Grant H. Kester, Professor of Art History in San Diego and founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. On the relation between art and social change. Kester: 'For me the aesthetic is, in a way, the... more
Talking to Grant H. Kester, Professor of Art History in San Diego and founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. On the relation between art and social change. Kester: 'For me the aesthetic is, in a way, the missing piece of modern political theory.'
Research Interests: Pleasure, Artistic Autonomy and Social Change, Aesthetics and Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics, Attachment Theory, and 8 moreAdorno's Aesthetic Theory, Methodologies for Artistic Research, Socially Engaged Art, Face-to-Face Encounter, Art and Agency, Arts and Social Change, Pleasure, art and politics, and Art and reciprocity
Here's some information on the new anthology I co-edited with Bill Kelley, Jr. for Duke. If you're interested in getting a copy there's a 30% off coupon code.
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This essay was written in response to “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism” by the Danish critic and historian Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen. Both essays were simultaneously published in FIELD (field-journal.com) and the Nordic Journal of... more
This essay was written in response to “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism” by the Danish critic and historian Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen. Both essays were simultaneously published in FIELD (field-journal.com) and the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics (http://nsae.au.dk/) in the winter of 2017.
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Here's a short post I wrote for A Blade of Grass (ABOG) on theory and practice in socially engaged art (http://www.abladeofgrass.org/fertile-ground/between-theory-and-practice/).
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This is the first chapter from The One and the Many (Duke University Press, 2011)
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This is the introduction to the new book that I co-edited with Bill Kelley Jr. It focuses on new forms of activist and socially engaged art in Latin America during the Pink Tide period. Out from Duke University Press this fall.
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Research Interests: Aesthetics, Art Theory, Contemporary Art, Public Art, Collaboration, and 10 moreJacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics, Political Art, Art Theory and Politics, Theory and Practice of Visual Arts, Cooperation, Art and Politics, Relational aesthetics, and Collaborative Art Practice
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This is an interview I conducted with Stephen Willats in the early 1990s, published in Afterimage, which I was editing at the time.