A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
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Simon Anderson

Associate Professor

Contact

Bio

Associate Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism (1992). BA, 1976, Sunderland University; MA and PhD, 1988, Royal College of Art, London, U.K.

Personal Statement

Simon Anderson is a British-born and -educated cultural historian whose art school exposure to fluxus helped to shape a career. He gained a Ph.D from the Royal College of Art in London, writing on two years of full-time research in the Fluxshoe/Beau Geste Press collection held by the Tate Gallery Archive. He has worked at SAIC since 1993, serving in a number of roles but mostly teaching a range of seminars and lecture classes on twentieth-century art and anti-art. In addition to organizing exhibitions and conducting concerts; designing, and producing publications; conceiving and collaborating on inter-institutional classes, he has written exhibition commentaries, magazine criticism, and book chapters on Fluxus, Mail-art, expanded poetry, the Situationist International, and conceptual photography. He has lectured widely, and has acted as a gallery dealer in, private consultant on, and public speaker about the experimental arts and artifacts of the 1960s, 70s & 80s. Long an advocate of performance as a way of knowing, he continues to analyze, to observe, arrange and perform events, concerts–and life amid the trees–in a Fluxus mode.

Recent Thesis Advisees

Morgan Turner (MAAH 2023), "Interpreting Spatial Poem by Mieako Shiomi"

Quinn Veasman (2021), "As Time Goes By: a Speculative Viewing of Ralston Farina’s Aléatoire Je ne sais quoi"

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Since the Exposition des arts incoherents in 1882, the orthodox story of art has been pre-figured, parodied, or echoed by ideas and activities which are less well-known but nevertheless informative about the state of the arts through modernism to today. Including Hydropaths, `pataphysicians and members of groups called Lettrisme or Neoism, propagating ideas ranging from transmental to pandrogenic, this course identifies and contextualizes some of the salient adventures of those who ignore convention to create and play before the vanguard and behind the canon.

Class Number

2258

Credits

3

Description

Since the early 1960s, artists have increasingly experimented with alternative methods of disseminating their ideas, using books or records, occasionally collaborating in periodicals, and other uncategorized projects. Students investigate the increasing acceptability of such activities and discuss a broad variety of publishing, from guerrilla fly-posting through mail-art magazines to the exhibition-in-a-book, including the unconventional artists' bookwork. Examining both well-known examples and obscure occurrences, the course attempts to place alternative art publishing in a contemporary context.

Class Number

1276

Credits

3

Description

What is the value of a manifesto? This course examines the difference between published proclamations by artists and the work they produce. Using contemporary and current criticism, the course will scrutinize, compare, and contrast a limited number of texts, objects, and activities within and since the Modern era. Students will not only learn more of the perceived-or misperceived-aims of given artists or movements, they will also learn more about the continuing conversation between theory and practice.

Class Number

2266

Credits

3

Description

From the 1950s to the 1980s the visual and lively arts were open to experiment. Painting and sculpture, poetry, dance, and theatre became indistinguishable at their margins, and performance art gained acceptance as a discipline. Lectures use primary documents and contemporary criticism from this rich formative period to better understand the present situation of live art. Research proceeds via reading, rehearsal, or re-embodiment of selected scores and scripts, to analysis and assessment of them as historical, interdisciplinary artworks. Pieces considered range from absurdist drama via visceral vaudeville to the monomorphic event..

Class Number

2191

Credits

3

Description

Books, magazines, and multiples have long been part of the fabric of the art world and are therefore useful avenues of historic enquiry. This seminar focuses on publications made by or in the interests of artists, and examines the various strategies they employ. From Aspen to Vile, from Baldessari to Shrigley, from dada to duda, many kinds of artists have disseminated their ideas in a variety of published forms. Using the proliferation of artists? publications from recent decades that are available in local collections, students will study a range of primary sources, be exposed to a general history, and conduct individual research in particular areas of art in publication.

Class Number

2355

Credits

3

Description

This course aims to give a thorough grounding in a phenomenon, which has been called 'the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties.' In this seminar, students investigate the politics, theory, aesthetics, and practice of Fluxists, whose activities deliberately confused the borders between painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and life. Their work raises problems which echo dada and agitprop, while prefiguring punk and, arguably, postmodernism.

Class Number

2270

Credits

3