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Dr Gavin Grindon

Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries

Email: g.grindon@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Roles:

Biography:

My research focuses primarily on cultural production in art and design; curating, museums and heritage; and cultural policy from 1900-present. My research takes the form of academic writing and curating.

A major area of my research is activist art, and histories and theories of art and culture related to protest and social movements. This involves working across fields such as art and design history, social movement studies, curating and museum studies, cultural policy and heritage, movement and labour history, and organisational studies.

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 workplace surveillance to anti-homeless spikes, 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 organised film programmes and conference events at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and the V&A, and consulted for museums and galleries internationally. I’ve written about activist art and protest cultures for Third Text, Art History, The Oxford Art Journal and elsewhere; and my writing on activist art has been translated into 8 languages.

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 it did in 2016. This was the first in a wave of similar moves by other cultural institutions, and of a wave of 'museum protest' which continues today. Cultural industries funding, divestment and labour organising remain an interest, and I've written about this for Social Text and The New York Times.

Before joining Queen Mary, I worked as a Senior Lecturer in Curating and Art History at the University of Essex; and as a research fellow and curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. I completed my PhD in Cultural Criticism at Manchester University in 2007 under Prof. Terry Eagleton.

Teaching

Undergraduate

  • BU233: Creative Industries

Postgraduate

  • BUSM161: Funding and Financing in the Creative Industries

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research

Research Interests:

My primary research focus is on activist art and social movement cultures. I have produced the first published surveys and exhibitions on various activist artists and groups and write about the production and effects of political art, and of art more generally.

I have research interests in histories of art, design, cultural production and cultural labour since 1900, with a particular focus on cultural production understood ‘from below’, in emergent, grassroots, non-professional or nascent professional forms. I have related interests in the politics and organisation of cultural production; cultural policy; and theories of affect and social organisation. I have described my approach as ‘art history from below,’ and engage with diverse methods and debates across the arts and social sciences.

I have recently undertaken projects which explore how digital methods can support critical approaches to cultural history, heritage and policy. These include using Natural Language Processing and Open Source Intelligence to identify and map over 900 British public monuments related to slavery at britishpublicmonumentsrelatedtoslavery.net and producing Homs, You’re in Our Hearts, a film using forensic digital methods to recover and preserve disobedient heritage of the 2011 Syrian uprising from the camera phone footage of its participants.

Centre and Group Membership:

Publications

Exhibitions

  • Werbepause: The Art of Subvertising, with StealThisPoster.org, Michelle Tylicki, Matt Bonner, Darren Cullen and Craig Clark. Kunstraum Kreuzberg Berlin, 2022.
  • The Museum of Neoliberalism, with Darren Cullen. London, 2019-present.
  • From Nope to Hope, with Jess Worth and Charlie Waterhouse, Brixton Community Centre, London, 2017.
  • The Occupation Museum, with Banksy. The Walled Off Hotel, Bethlehem, 2017-present.
  • Cruel Designs, Banksy’s Dismaland, Weston-Super-Mare, 2015
  • Disobedient Objects, with Catherine Flood. Victoria and Albert Museum London, 2014-15. (and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia, 2015-16).

Websites and films

  • Homs You’re in Our Hearts: Re-collecting the Culture of the Syrian Revolution, with Martyna Marciniak, Inana Othman, Daragh Murray, short film, 2024.
  • with Jennie Williams and Duncan Hay, britishmonumentsrelatedtoslavery.net, website/dataset, 2023-ongoing.

Journal articles

  • ‘Mapping British Public Monuments Related to Slavery’, with Jennie Williams and Duncan Hay. Slavery and Abolition, 2024.
  • ‘Curating With Counterpowers: Activist Curating, Museum Protest and Institutional Liberation,’ Social Text 155 (41:2), 2023.
  • ‘Fantasies of Participation: The Situationist Imaginary of New Forms of Art and Labour,’ The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 24, 2015.
  • ‘Poetry Written in Gasoline: Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker,’ Art History, 38:1, 2014.
  • Revolutionary Romanticism: Henri Lefebvre’s Revolution-as-Festival,’ Third Text, 121, 2013.
  • ‘Surrealism, Dada and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde,’ Oxford Art Journal. 34:1, 2011. (Reprinted in Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 8: Grassroots Modernism, Jan 2012, for which it was a prompt circulated to all contributors; and translated into Turkish for publication on e-skop.com, 2013).
  • ‘Alchemist of the Revolution: The Affective Materialism of Georges Bataille,’ Third Text, 104, 2010.
  • ‘Carnival Against Capital: A Comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem and Bey,’ Anarchist Studies 12(2), 2004. Translated into Turkish (Siyahi, 5, 2005), and Spanish (Antropología y Anarquism, ed. Beltrán Roca, Madrid, Malatesta Press, 2009, and as a pamphlet, Carnival Contra el Capital, Entropia Ediciones, 2012).

Book chapters 

  • ‘Introduction: Disobedient Objects’ with Catherine Flood, in Disobedient Objects, V&A Publishing, 2014. Republished in Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Tom Snow, MIT Press/Whitechapel, 2024; The Curatorial Studies Reader, ed. Helena Reckitt and Simon Sheikh, Bloomsbury, 2024; Design (&) Activism, ed. Tom Bieling, Mimesis, 2019; The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today, vol.2, ed. Marc Leger, NeMe, 2019; translated into Portuguese for Design/Art/Technology journal, 2019; Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Participation and Occupation, ed. Martino Stierli and Mechtild Widrich, IB Taurus, 2015.
  • ‘How to Guides’ in Art, Politics and the Pamphlet, ed. Gillian Whiteley and Jane Tormey, Bloomsbury, 2019.
  • ‘The Notion of Irony in Cultural Activism,’ in Theorising Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Potentialities, ed. Aylin Kuryel and Begüm Özden Fırat, Rodopi, New York/ Amsterdam, 2011 (Also translated into Turkish for publication in the journal Cult).
  • ‘The Breath of the Possible,’ in Constituent Imagination, ed. David Graeber and Stevphen Shukaitis, AK Press,  Edinburgh, 2007.

Edited Books

  • With Catherine Flood, Disobedient Objects, V&A Publishing, 2014 (Contributors include Jack Halberstam and David Graeber).
  • Waldemar Fydrich, Lives of the Orange Men: An Autobiographical History of The Polish Orange Alternative Movement, Foreword by the Yes Men, Minor Compositions, London, 2014 (Abridged English translation of Żywoty Mężów Pomarańczowych).

Supervision

I welcome approaches from prospective PhD students, and am open to interdisciplinary and critical approaches across the arts and social sciences. 

Current Doctoral Students

  • Anastasiia Korableva, A War of Words: Text-Based Street Art as a Form of Resistance in Present-Day Russia.
  • Amber Burchard, Fabric of Democracy: Printed Textiles and Propaganda During the Cold War.

Past PhDs I have supervised include

  • Theo Price, Emergency Curating: The COBRA Committee and the Aesthetics of Government Response.
  • Chris Collier, A Transformative Morphology of the Unique: Situating Psychogeography’s 1990s Revival (with Dr. Stevphen Shukaitis)
  • Lauren Windsor, Through Skin, Flesh & Now the Heart: The Photographic Transgressions of Raoul Ubac (with Prof. Dawn Ades)

Theses examined

  • Camilo Escobar, PhD, A Question of Socio-Political Configuration: Artistic Practices in Community, Culture and Public Spaces, Kings College London, 2023.
  • Biung Ishmahasan, PhD, Indigenous Relational Space and Performance: Curating Together towards Sovereignty in Taiwan and Beyond, University of Essex, 2021.
  • David Murrieta Flores, PhD, Situationist Margins: The Situationist Times, King Mob, Black Mask, and S.NOB Magazines (1962-1970), University of Essex, 2017.
  • Ana Bilbao Yarto, PhD, Swimming Upstream: Small Visual Arts Organisations in the Midst of the Ethical Turn, 1990-2016, University of Essex, 2016.
  • Kim Charnley, PhD, The Collective and Criticism After Conceptual Art: Institutional Critique between The Fox and Group Material - 1975-1989, University of Essex, 2015.
  • Rebecca D’Andrea, MRes, Anarchist Methods in Art History, Birmingham University, 2023.
  • Catherine Backhouse, MRes, Convergent Networks, Counterculture and the Recomposition of the Radical Political Subject, Kingston University, 2012.

Public Engagement

My curatorial projects aim to support publics while also being produced with and for social movements themselves.

The Museum of Neoliberalism in the UK was opened as part of the events around the 2019 Labour Party conference and continues to engage visitors, with positive reviews including a four-star recommendation in Time Out.

The Walled Off Hotel in Palestine, and its museum, is one of the country’s leading tourist attractions and contributes to Palestine’s solidarity economy. It is currently closed but we hope to open again soon.

Dismaland received around 150,000 visitors. Visit Somerset estimated the project brought £20m of extra investment to Somerset. The sections I curated involved collaborations with various groups including RiotID, Acorn tenants union and Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Disobedient Objects received around 450,000 visitors, and was the most visited exhibition at the V&A since 1946. The ‘how to’ pamphlet for a makeshift tear gas in the exhibition was used by participants in the first waves of US Black Lives Matter and Hong Kong Umbrella Movement protests (and bizarrely became a plot device in the J.J. Abrams film ‘10 Cloverfield Lane’).

My research produced a REF2021 Impact Case Study including multiple economic and social impacts. I consult for museums, galleries and NGOs internationally.

My research has been featured in the media on multiple occasions, including 6 BBC features, including BBC TV News and Radio 4’s Front Row and Design Dimension shows; 6 New York Times features, twice on the front page and once as an invited columnist. Channel 4 News has twice presented its program live from projects I’ve worked on, including interviews with myself. Le Monde Magazine ran a biographical feature on my curatorial work and my work has had extensive international coverage in specialist art and design media.

I have delivered invited talks and lectures for Cambridge University; CUNY Graduate Centre; the Royal Geographical Society; the Royal College of Art; Queens Museum New York; M+ Museum Hong Kong; Universidade Anhembi Morumbi; Museum of Modern Art Warsaw; the Architecture Association; McGill University; Humbolt University Berlin; UCL; University of York; the Courtauld Institute; Modern Art Oxford; Autograph ABP and elsewhere.

I have acted as external examiner for programmes in Curating; Art History; and Philosophy, Politics and Aesthetics for Goldsmiths, Brighton and Kent universities.

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