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jwelchman@ucsd.edu
Biography:
John Welchman combines the roles of modernist art historian and contemporary critic with work in visual-cultural studies. His most recent publications are the 'Survey' for Mike Kelley in the Phaidon Contemporary Artists series (1999); Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Amsterdam/London: G + B Arts International/Routledge, 2001), one of the first critical studies of the art of the 1990s, and, as editor, the collected writings of Mike Kelley (vol. I Foul Perfection, MIT Pres, 2003; vol. II Minor Histories, MIT Press, 2004; vol. III Sonic Cultures, les presses du reél, 2005).
Welchman earned his BA (1981) and MA from Cambridge University, and his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art (1991). His dissertation Word, Image and Modernism investigated the various orders of relation between visual and textual practices in the modern period. His work on the relations between visual and textual discourse is published in The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art/MIT Press, 1989); and in two books, Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1995), and Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale University Press, 1997). He has edited a collection of interdisciplinary critical essays addressing various conditions of border culture, Rethinking Borders (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and is also working on a collection of writings on visual cultures by French theorist Gilles Deleuze.
Welchman book chapters include: SHOT (on photography), ed. Stuart Koop (Melbourne, 1993); The Rhetoric of the Frame: Articulating Distinction in the Visual Arts, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge UP, 1996); Talking with your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin (Duke UP, 1998); Space, Site and Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minnesota, 2000); "Colour, Light and Labour: Futurism and the Dissolution of Work" to Work & Modern Times, ed. Griselda Pollack and Valerie Mainz (Ashgate, 2000); Trésors publics: 20 ans de création dans les Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), commissioned by the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Délégation aux arts plastiques and coedited with le Centre national des arts plastiques (Pompidou); and Architecture à la carte: Parallels Between the Preparation of Food and the Production of Space, eds. Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
Welchman is active within the critical, museum and gallery communities, acting as a contributing editor, correspondent or contributor to Art Bulletin (NY), Art History (London), Texte zur Kunst (Cologne), Third Text (London), CAA Reviews (NY), Art International (Paris), ArtNews (NY), Artscribe International (London), Flash Art (Milan) Art and Design (London), The Interior (Melbourne), Art Monthly (London/Canberra), Art & Text (Los Angeles), Agenda (Melbourne), Arts Magazine (NY), Transition (Melbourne), New Observations (NY), and Artforum (NY), for which he wrote a column "Here, There and Otherwise" (1988-89). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune (Paris), The Economist (London), Village Voice (NY), LA Weekly, The Australian (Sydney), etc. He has broadcast on KPBS Public Radio, the BBC World Service and Radio National (Australia).
He was co-author of the catalogue for the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1986), and has contributed catalogue essays to exhibitions in the US, UK, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Korea and Australia including: Tate Gallery, (1984); Edsvik konst ock kultur, Stockholm; the 9th Biennale of Sydney (1992-93); Narcissism, California Center for the Arts, Escondido (1996); Western Desert Painting, Pizzi Gallery (1991-92); Exchange of Meaning: Translation in the Work of Joseph Kosuth, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (1989); the retrospective Antoni Tàpies Museo Nacional Centro de Arte (Reina Sofia), Madrid (March-May 2000), also shown at the Haus der Kunst, Munich; ); Orshi Drozdik at The Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary, (December, 2001); and The Uncanny (an exhibition by Mike Kelley), Tate Liverpool (February, 2004).
International conference activity: Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen (1992, 2000); the Deleuze Conference, Warwick University, UK (1992); British Association of Art Historians (London, 1993, Birmingham 1994); Symposium for the 9th Biennale of Sydney (1993); Il Forum Brasilia de Artes Visuais, Brasilia (1993); the International Documentary Film Conference, Melbourne, Australia (1995); International School of Theory in the Humanities at Santiago de Compostella, "The Future of the Humanities in Europe and the Americas" (July-August, 1997); Center for Aesthetics and Logic, Paris (October, 1997); The Histories of Theory, Center for Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario (April, 1998); International Association for Philosophy and Literature, UC Irvine (May, 1998); International Association of Word & Image Studies, Scripps College, Claremont, California (March, 1999); Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain international symposium (May, 1999); Western Humanities Alliance "BEYOND BABEL," UCSD (October, 1999); University of Madrid, international colloquium, Cuenca, Spain: "El arte contemporáneo y las Nuevas articulaciones de lo social" (October, 2000); UC Santa Barbara, "Power of the Archive," (February, 2001); Santa Monica Museum of Art, "Performance Art Today" (March 2001); Art Froum, Berlin, panel convener and chair, "Art in the 1990s" (October, 2001); "Art Now" conference, EWHA, Seoul Korea, keynote speaker; Orienations, International Word and Image Studies, Hamburg, Germany (July, 2002); Media City, Seoul, Korea, keynote speaker, with Jean Baudrillard, Sadie Plant, Lawrence Rickels (October, 2002); moderator and speaker (November, 2002); UCLA Dept. of Art (sponsored by the Ford Foundation) "Movies, Buildings and Brains," (April, 2003); conference co-convener, keynote speaker and panelist, Cultural Provocation, a marae-based hui and conference, Auckland (August, 2003).
Welchman has taught at the Open University (UK); UCLA (1987); Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (1990-92); and Harvard University (1995). He is currently completing two book projects on the social inscription of represented faces: The Celluloid Face (on the cultural circulation of faces in film theory and practice); and An Intellectual History of the Face (a wide-ranging study of the relation of represented faces to systems of power, economy, science and visual modernity). He is also preparing an international survey of global contemporary art for Phaidon (London).
Two general interest publications, Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook (New York: Workman, 1990), co-authored with Anya von Bremzen, and Fiesta! (New York: Doubleday, 1997), for which he provided photographs, have won the James Beard award.
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