Dr Gavin Grindon

Biography

My research focuses primarily on art and curating from 1900-present, focusing on political, critical and socially-engaged art and curating. My research takes the form of academic writing and public exhibitions. My writing focuses on new 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. My first academic background was in critical theory and continental philosophy. My PhD, at Manchester under Ken Hirschkop and Terry Eagleton, traced the reiteration of theories of 'revolution-as-festival' from dissident Surrealists in the 1930s; through the Situationist International and adjacent 1960s art-activist groups; to second-wave anarchists and artists linked to the global justice movement of the 1990s. Since then my work 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 understanding such work, that occurs in art worlds mostly outside the institutions and conventions of 'fine art', involves rethinking theories and methods in curating or art and design history - and also in other disciplines that speak to the cultures and organisations of social movements. I have published on these topics in Social Text, Art History, the Oxford Art Journal, Third Text 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. I'm currently co-authoring a history of the group. While completing my forthcoming book on activist-art, I have recently begun parallel projects which explore how new methods in the digital humanities can be developed to support the above kinds of critical methods in art history and curating. 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