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

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Simon Anderson

Associate Professor

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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 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

1140

Credits

3

Description

This course introduces the history of aesthetics through a spectrum of ideas about taste, beauty and value--and their place in art and design today. Choosing exemplars from the AIC collection, and reading a selection of texts from Plato to Wittgentsein--and beyond, students will research and discuss different approaches to 'good' in the realm of visual art and design. The aim of the course is to provide a wide and informed visual and literal vocabulary with which each student can begin to forge an individual aesthetic.

Class Number

2148

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

Even before the First Conference of International Situationists in 1957, there were stylistic differences and ideological contradictions among the participants. Since then, texts and exhibitions claiming connection to the Situationist International have proliferated.


This seminar traces the evolution of those original tendencies that made even a temporary situationist allegiance possible, and follow the trajectories of individual careers. Students explore the images, facts, theories and legends, and compare the heretical ideas and actions of the earliest members of this brief association, to assess the subsequent and current status of the Situationist International.

Class Number

2254

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 independent study program for Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism candidates is taken in the final term of coursework.

Class Number

2436

Credits

3