Dr Dan Smith
Title
Senior Lecturer Fine Art Theory - BA
College
Chelsea College of Arts
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research
Biography
Dan Smith studied fine art in the early 1990s, and went on to develop Wunderkammer, a collaborative practice exploring notions of collection, display and material culture. He continues to explore this territory in his Museum Subjects project. He is also exploring forms of publication as event, combining sound and image in live performances, both in collaboration as The Department of Things to Come, and in solo performances.Current research includes ongoing collaborative investigations of utopia, science fiction and spaces of publication, comics and graphic novels, graphic medicine, outsider art, and the necessary death of contemporary art.
He is the author of two books. Traces of Modernity (Zero Books 2012) offers critical engagements with four objects from the nineteenth century: The ruins of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and the dinosaurs that remain, the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum and the short novel by H.G. Wells - The Time Machine. These provide very different forms of encounter, but are bound by the shadow of the Great Exhibition of 1851. These four objects are identified as formative traces of the past within the present. They provide models for critical thought and suggest answers to the problematic conditions that they present as ideologically specific relics from a previous age.
Agamben Reframed (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming) is an accessible account of Giorgio Agamben’s thought in relation to contemporary art and visual culture. Agamben’s ideas are brought to life here by diverse encounters, ranging from the work of artists such as Susan Hiller and Gordon Cheung, to The Hunger Games.
External Links
Research Outputs
Art/Design item
- Smith D. Altertopian.com (2009)
Article
- Smith D. Deferring and materiality: incomplete reflections on Donald Preziosi (2016)
- Smith D. The Mining of History, Cognitive Disorder and Spiritualism in Olivia Plender’s A Stellar Key to the Summerland. (2016)
- Smith D. Reading Correspondences Through the Virtual Feminist Museum. (2015)
- Smith D. Architecture, Violence and Sensation: A Visitor’s Guide to Mega City One (2013)
- Smith D. The secret of the gift: The movement of value in Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s Capital (2002)
Book
- Smith D. Traces of modernity (2012)
Book Section
- Byrne-Smith D. Harvey Kurtzman and the Influence of Mad Magazine (2018)
- Smith D. Worldbuilding In the work of Jeffrey Dennis, in Jeffrey Dennis (2017)
- Smith D. The Anorexic as Zombie Witness: Illness and Recovery in Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow (2016)
- Smith D. Reading Folk Archive: on the Utopian Dimension of the Artists’ Book (2013)
- Smith D. Reading the Albert Memorial (2010)
- Smith D. Wells's First Utopia: Materiality and Portent (2007)
Teaching
Current research students
- Neil Farnan, Utopoly – a utopian research method (Joint supervisor)
- Yang Liu, Visitors, Consumers and Conscious Agents: Shedding Light to the Role of Design in Promoting Awareness in Art Museum (Lead supervisor)
- Charlie Murphy, Future Cycle: Feedback Loops in Speculative Graphic Fiction (Lead supervisor)
Past research students
- Daniel Baker, Technologies of Subjectivity: The Museum Exhibition, the 18th Century South Pacific and the Production of the Modern Self. (Lead supervisor)