Dr Gavin Grindon

Biography

My research focuses primarily on art, curating and cultural policy from 1900-present, focusing on political art, design and curating. My research takes the form of academic writing and public exhibitions. A major area of my research is histories and critical theories of art and curating vis-a-vis protest and social movements. This involves working across terms such as activist-art; social practice; institutional critique; and across fields such as art and design history, curating and museum studies, cultural policy, movement and labour history, and organisational studies. I am currently completing a book on the history of activist-art. This research has had two main threads. Firstly, I am interested in specific 'art histories from below' of different forms of activist and political art practice, primarily those produced within and for social movements. Secondly, I am interested in how seeing and understanding such cultural production, which occurs mostly outside the institutions and conventions of 'fine art', involves rethinking theories and methods for curating, art and design history and cultural policy - and also for other disciplines that speak to the cultures and organisations of social movements. I have published on these topics in Social Text, Third Text, the Oxford Art Journal, Art History and elsewhere. In 2014 I co-curated the exhibition Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, about objects of art and design produced by protest movements internationally since the late 1970s. It was, surprisingly, the museum's most visited exhibition since 1946. In 2015 I curated Cruel Designs, an exhibition examining design for social control (from CCTV and anti-homeless spikes to border fences and rubber bullets) at Banksy's Dismaland. In 2017 I co-curated a Palestinian-led Museum of the Occupation at Banksy's Walled off Hotel in Palestine. In 2018, I co-curated From Nope to Hope, which included work by Tania Bruguera, Jeremy Deller, Dread Scott, Shepard Fairey, Milton Glaser, Guerrilla Girls and others. In 2019 I co-curated a satirical Museum of Neoliberalism with the artist Darren Cullen which is currently open for tourists and school visits in South London. In 2022, I was a co-curator of Werbepause, an exhibition on adbusting and its histories at Kunstraum Kreuzberg. I have consulted for museums and galleries internationally. I was a member of the collective Liberate Tate, who from 2010 produced performance interventions in Tate spaces to pressure the organisation to drop BP sponsorship, which they did in 2016. This was the first in a wave of similar moves by other cultural institutions, and of a wave of 'museum protest' since. The group has been widely written about, and the group's archive is held at the University of Essex special collections. Cultural industries funding and campaigns for divestment and labour organising remain an interest, which I've written about for Social Text and the New York Times. While completing my forthcoming book on activist-art, I have undertaken parallel projects which explore how new methods in the digital humanities can be developed to support critical approaches to cultural history, curating and policy. These include using Natural Language Processing and Open Source intelligence to identify and map over 900 British public monuments related to slavery at britishpublicmonumentsrelatedtoslavery.net and producing a film using forensic digital methods to recover and preserve disobedient heritage of the 2011 Syrian uprising from the camera phone footage of its participants. I'm always happy to hear from prospective PhD students in any of these areas.

Qualifications

• PhD English Studies, University of Manchester, 2007

• MA Cultural Criticism, University of Manchester, 2001

• BA English Literature and Language, University of Leeds, 2000