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 mold a diverse career. In 1988 he gained a Ph.D from the Royal College of Art in London, writing a dissertation that tracked and probed an idea of fluxus from discovery and inception to record and history, in the Tate Gallery Archive. He has worked at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1993, teaching a range of seminars and lecture classes on twentieth-century art and anti-art. He has in the past served as co-chair of the Faculty Senate; the Chair of the department of Art history, theory and criticism; and Divisional Head of Academic Programs. In addition to organizing exhibitions, designing, and producing publications, 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 nineteen-sixties and ‘seventies. Long an advocate of performance as a way of knowing, he continues to observe, arrange and perform events and concerts in a Fluxus mode.
Recent Thesis Advisees
Quinn Veasman (2021), “As Time Goes By: a Speculative Viewing of Ralston Farina’s Aléatoire Je ne sais quoi”
Disclaimer: All work represents the views of the INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS & AUTHORS who created them, and are not those of the school or museum of the Art Institute.
