International Randall Chair Lecture, "Art as Intervention"

This talk in the Arts Speaker Series will be a review of some key moments in the emergence and recurrence of art as intervention along with a theorization of what differentiates this kind of artistic work from performance or installation. Addressing issues of location and duration, vision and witness, space and what Pope.L referred to as "social geometry," I aim to provide a useful history of this genre of work, from Duchamp, John Sloan and Gertrude Drick via Yves Klein, Daniel Buren, Gordon Matta-Clark, Orlan, Jenny Holzer, Mona Hatoum and Aslı Çavuşoğlu.

Lewis Johnson is a historian and theoretician of art, media and visual cultures, living and working in Istanbul. Educated in the UK, he has taught in departments of history of art, art and design, and camera-image studies at a series of higher education institutions in the UK and, for the last two decades, in Turkey, where he has helped found and develop a number of innovative programs of study. His specialisms include a wide range of pictorial arts, across early modern, modern and postmodern Western, Turkish and Middle Eastern cultures, the history and theory of modern institutions of art, theories and practices of digital media arts, and installation and intervention art. He has worked closely with a number of UK and Turkish practitioners, curating work in London and Istanbul, as well as being invited to select the Turkish representative of the 2015 Venice Biennial. Recent work includes essays on Gözde İlkin’s painted and embroidered work, paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Gerhard Richter for Routledge’s Terrorism and the Arts (March 2021) and Van Gogh as migrant artist. While at Alfred, as well as teaching in the history of art and orientalism and in innovation in post-1945 art, he will be continuing with his research on art as intervention.