Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture
Amelia Jones practices a queer, anti-racist, feminist history and theory of twentieth- and twenty-first century Euro-American visual arts, including performance, film, video, and installation—articulated in relation to increasingly global frameworks.
Jones is the author of a number of books including Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (1994), and Self-Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006). This latter book expands on her work on body art, exploring the experience and understanding of the self in relation to performances of the body via technologies of representation from analogue photography to the Internet. It is linked to Jones's new research on the problematic of identity or identification in relation to visuality and Euro-American histories and practices of contemporary art and visual culture broadly construed; this latter interest finds its way into a number of articles published in journals from Art History to Parallax and The Drama Review and will result in a book tentatively entitled Seeing Differently: Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.
In this new research project, Seeing Differently, Jones draws on sources from aesthetic philosophy to art history and performance studies to neuro-science and models of psychic and collective identification to explore the problem of how the visual functions in our navigation of the world around us as well as in the more specialized arena of the visual arts. The book will present a deep historical and theoretical analysis of how identity has functioned historically and continues to function in relation to structures of visuality and the discourses and institutions associated with the visual arts broadly construed, and offer a new theory of identity in relation to visual culture.
Jones has curated exhibitions (including Sexual Politics [1996]), organized performance and creative events (including Theorising Queer Visualities [2005] and Faith and Identity in Contemporary Visual Culture [2006]), and edited volumes, such Contemporary Art, 1945-2003 (2005) and Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2010), which collectively attempt to rethink standard chronologies and modes of thinking about areas of visual culture studies and art history by including voices previously marginalized, or otherwise not fully accounted for, in debates and histories of these fields. Strategically, as with Jones's curating and single-authored books, these aim to provide new ways of thinking histories of art and ideas that work in productive tension with existing dominant histories. This goal of (un)doing and/or rethinking art's histories (including the very structures through which these histories unfold and are institutionally embedded) is also reflected in the new series Jones is co-editing with Marsha Meskimmon at University of Manchester Press, entitled "Rethinking Art's Histories."
Jones's teaching presents canonical as well as marginal practices across twentieth- and twenty-first century cultural practices, seeking to present contingent histories of art, performance, and visual culture and their discursive and theoretical frameworks. Jones's courses integrate intellectual histories of various modes of critical thought, including those articulated through art practice and criticism, philosophy, and identity politics (among others). These courses are suited to both art history specialists/majors and those interested in these issues coming from other disciplines such as architecture and urban planning, gender and sexuality studies, history, philosophy, and comparative literature.
Jones welcomes in particular inquiries from any potential graduate students interested in these approaches and areas of research—or in other areas that might push her to think otherwise.
The photograph is of Amelia Jones being interviewed at the Centre Pompidou Elles! exhibition (photograph courtesy Paul C. Donald, © 2009).