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

This class surveys the artistic themes, styles and producers of the period, across a variety of visual art media including painting, performance, sculpture, video and experimental media. The effects on aesthetics and activities of some social, scientific and philosophic ideas which informed the decade?such as feminism, ecology or pluralism?are also addressed.

Class Number

2110

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

1145

Credits

3

Description

This course charts the demise of the object and image in the work of modern and contemporary art. Known in various guises as concept or conceptual art, process art, information or idea art, this apparent assault on the visual nature of art was undertaken by many artists who were to become very well regarded in the sixties and seventies-and their influence is still felt today. The course will attempt to identify different strands within this general trend in terms of aesthetic, political, and historical precession; and consideration will be given to the possible reasons behind the ramifications of the dematerialization of the art object.

Class Number

2121

Credits

3

Description

This seminar focuses on correspondence art in the twentieth century, and the historical relationships with prior and subsequent artistic uses of networks, including academic, informal, postal and virtual. Artists and networks considered will include: Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School; George Brecht and Robert Filliou's Eternal Network - a concept later taken up by John Held Jr.; institutions and resource centers such as Image Bank, Other Books and So, and periodicals such as Commonpress, etc.

Class Number

2123

Credits

3

Description

The seminar traces and illuminates some art historical trajectories of pataphysics since it was defined by Alfred Jarry in the 1890s. Then and subsequently it has been invoked by such as Bonnard and Baudrillard, Boris Vian and DJ Spooky--among many more. After introductions to Jarry, his work, sources and successors, students will follow approved individual research paths informed by collaborative presentations. The research seeks to locate, describe, and apply an aesthetic within `Pataphysics and it?s offshoots.

Class Number

2109

Credits

3