Rose-Anne Gush

Dr. Rose-Anne Gush

Technische Universität Graz (july – august 2021)

postdoc project : Instability of Form after the Global Turn

Vita

Dr. Rose-Anne Gush is an art historian, theorist and educator. Since October 2020 she is University Assistant (post-Doc) at IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art in the faculty of Architecture at TU Graz, Austria. Her current research focusses on theories of „global art“, the spatial politics of capitalism and artistic form, concepts of the border, and the relationships between colonialism, empire, fascism and capitalism. She was the recipient of post-doctoral fellowships at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich and DFK Paris. Her first book length project (in progress), Artistic Labour of the Body: Deformation in Post-War Art and Literature, builds on her PhD, exploring the place, use of, and meaning of the body in postwar art and literature in the Austrian context, in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics. She completed her PhD (supported by a University of Leeds 110 Anniversary Scholarship, 2014-17 and a Zantop Travel Award, 2016) in 2019 at the University of Leeds. Her research is published in Kunst und PolitikJahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft (2020); Third Text (2019); Performance Research (2018); Objects of Feminism (Helsinki, 2017), and AWARE (2017) among others. She has taught Art History and Theory at the University of Leeds, the Slade School for Fine Art, University College London and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Research focus

Instability of Form after the Global Turn

 

Returning to the advent of art’s hybridization, Instability of Form after the Global Turn aims to supplement dominant art historical and theoretical understanding of this process in the 1960s, by looking to a longer history of women surrealist or surrealist adjacent artists working and living in Europe and the Caribbean between the 1930s–70s. It will use this body of work to investigate Theodor Adorno’s perspicacious concept of „Verfransung“, the fraying of the boundaries between the art genres, explicated in Art and the Arts (1967), arguing for its relevance for resituating „global art“ in the present. With a commitment to understanding this corpus immanent to its historical context and genealogy, and drawing on methods developed in social and feminist art history, aesthetics as well as archival research, this project will analyse the works in light of their navigation of spatial, temporal, material and corporeal boundaries and in conjunction with a spatial analysis of the combined and uneven development of capitalism. Bringing together seemingly divergent artistic and theoretical materials, the project reconsiders how „global art“ is understood both in relation to aesthetics, and to questions of the border, migration and displacement within a C20 history.

Contact

Rose-Anne Gush

Dr. Rose-Anne Gush